I think equally cheapening the product is the onslaught of classical albums that present classical music as nothing more than musical wallpaper with things called 'music to relax by', Mozart for babies, 100 romantic piano classics...
The first result on youtube for Mozart's Requiem ( with the most views, 100 million) is a shitty edited version of the work (like 9 minutes long) ...fucking pathetic...
I disagree, because in the case of these "dumbed down" collections, the people buying them are not going to buy "serious" releases if the other stuff is unavailable.
When I was 12 years old, I asked my mother to buy a 99 cent (or was it 49 cent? - this was the early '60s) vinyl LP of "The Most Beautiful Classical Music" at the A&P Supermarket (the same place where we bought our Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia). The music was mostly boring, but I fell in love with one selection: Bruch's Adagio (that's how it was identified). When I got a bit older I went to a department store and paid $2 for a Victrola LP with Bruch's Violin Concerto No.1 in G Minor played by Jaime Laredo. I was hooked on classical music.
@@anthropocentrus I checked it out: simply HORRID! Do people think think they are listening to a _complete_ unfinished masterpiece? This must be the ultimate in dumbing down.
My main local classical radio station is going this way. Single movements out of context with the larger work, programs like “Night Music” which is all mellow adagios, the occasional Beethoven’s 9th which is so quick-tempoed that I have to wonder if it was specifically commissioned to be played in under an hour so they can program everything in neat hourly blocks (if they aren’t just launching into the Ode To Joy right at the middle, when the full chorus returns after the lengthy instrumental section, which I have heard them play)… it’s awful sometimes.
It’s interesting that classical music is more accessible than ever. One can access an immense number of recordings virtually for free (they are free to listen to on RUclips). At the same time, it seems to be valued less. There was a time when Leonard Bernstein was giving scholar lectures and concerts on commercial television. It’s unimaginable in today’s cultural environment that such a thing would be commercially viable. Does even PBS do such broadcasts anymore? In the 70s and 80s, Denver had a COMMERCIAL classical radio station, ie a station that could actually make money broadcasting classical music. It has long since disappeared, along with many other such stations across the country. I doubt that the rise of the Internet had anything to do with the decline, but it’s at least good to know that it’s providing an alternative outlet (along with satellite radio). How does one compute the percentage of the population that actually listens to and appreciates classical? Kudos to David for not being a snob, including a vinyl snob.
That is a valuable point. One can consider the Internet bringing a problem of “google”-ility. How do you find a song today? How do you google something abstract? One can also consider the shattered attention span or the lack of incorporation in general education? Just some thoughts from a classical flautist.
Dave: This may well be your most interesting and insightful talk yet. You hit the nail on the head--that is, the many nails that have gone into the coffin of the classical record industry. I have to confess that, even though an AT fan, I passed on the shelf edition. Too expensive. But I snapped up the box when it came out. The irony is that, as another of your commentators confessed, I have nver listened to a single CD in that collection; in part because I already knew many of those recordings, and for that reason was more interested in collecting other, less familiar, artists, One interesting anomaly, is DG's Bach333 megabox, released in 2018, which I recently acquired. For a Bach lover with a scholarly bent like me, it proved irresistible (though my bank account suffered "viel Bekümmernis." In any case, that huge traveling Bach library seems like something of a throwback. Though not housed in a piece of furniture (it could have been), it comes in a huge reinforced cardboard box, with three hardcover books, smaller booklets with complete notes, track listings, and--get this!!--texts and translations for all the vocal works. Not only does the box cover all of Bach's extant works, it includes multiple recorded versions of just about everything. Some of these are historical recordings, most are recent HIP performances. The whole thing is expertly and effectively curated. And of course it's a strictly limited edition, and will likely never be reissued. However, it is a quality product that doesn't cheapen the legacy of the great Cantor of Leipzig. One last observation. When, after great effort, I finally dislodged this monument from its packaging, my first thought was, "this is Bach's tomb and perhaps also the grave of classical music recording as we have known it." Thanks so much for your commentaries, Dave--and also for your invaluable pedagogy. If the classical music industry is ever resurrected, we may all have you to thank.
To see how classical music appreciation has diminshed, historically, one has only to look at how such music was treated in Hollywood. In the 1930s and 1940s, movies were filled with classical music; there seemed to be no fear of it on the part of the public. You had biopics about composers (Katharine Hepburn as Clara Schumann, anyone?), classical pieces in cartoons (Disney, Warner Bros. --- Bugs Bunny as the Barber of Seville), and films about instrumentalists (Humoresque, with John Garfield/Isaac Stern playing Zigeunerweisen...). People listened to classical music even when they were not classical music fans or nuts. Now, that is gone. The world is divided... Anyway, David, I love your RUclips videos, and appreciate them. Keep it going, and thank you.
Labels are clearly buckling under the weight of multiple versions of the same pieces. The flood of mega boxes feels like the last hurrah for an older generation of performers and that the labels will put their eggs into the ‘new’ recording market. This is why I have hoovered up as many boxes as I can. Problem is it will now take literally years to work through them. I am glad I have that problem - the Szell box alone justifies it - but very soon it’s not a problem people will be able to have. Snap them up while you can, everyone! Mr Hurwitz’s videos on various sets have cost me a pretty penny, but there is no guarantee these recordings will be accessible in physical form for much longer.
I think the reason for this is that these things are very cheap to produce. A few major labels still tout a handful of artists- Lang Lang on DG and Igor Levitt on Sony, for instance-but it simply can't cost much to rerelease old recordings, especially when the majors are part of massive holding companies with enormous budgets.
The plethora of boxes resembles a going out of business sale to me. It's deplorable they don't stay in print longer. You're right, though, it does take a long time to actually play them; I've had the Ormandy box for months and am now up to CD 80 of 120.
The competition for new recordings is often the old ones. OK, back in the day, Ormandy, Solti, Karajan, Haitink, and Bernstein were in competition with new releases. Before then it might have been Szell, Klemperer, and Munch. Guess what the competition is now? The dead guys as conductors! This also applies to pianists, violinists, cellists, and chamber ensembles. Yes, LP's deteriorated, but I've got 40-year-old CD's that have lost nothing.
Dave, it is so sad. I always loved booklets and analyses. Listening and reading sometimes musicological stuff is a special joy. That's why I hate streaming services. Half of enjoyment may easily gone. It so sad and true. Everything valuable is fading away in our time.
Exactly. When I used to buy LPs in the 1980's I would pour over the notes and I remember Neville Cardus' notes in the Mahler - Haitink (Philips box). Now I buy downloads and never even look at the notes and shamefully hardly ever listen to the recordings themselves. I feel regret and somewhat shame at how the ''product'' has replaced the LP as a cultural artefact.
Yes, I especially like the booklets in (for one example) Naxos' Historical series, where you can read about the recording session, how many and which different takes were issued when and why, on which old labels, whether the artist(s) had a hissy fit at the session, etc.
I miss that too. I remember getting posters and booklets with lyrics in CDs as a kid, but streaming services don’t bring the same joy. I know physical CDs are huge in K-pop as they come with photo books, photo cards of the idols, and extras. It’s a shame more non K-pop artists don’t do that kind of thing.
All I can tell you David is that you are helping the industry with your channel here. I am buying both music I can stream and physical boxed sets based on your videos, the Poulenc boxed set for instance and the Unknown Strauss box. This will undoubtedly continue as I explore here. What is true for me is probably true for others.
Great talk, David! Norbert Lebrecht's book "Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness" describes in detail and in very enjoyable way the "shameful" death of the classical record industry, because of tons of bad decisions at corporate level. There is another very sad consequence of the fall and decline of that industry: that a very important channel has been lost for young artists. Let me illustrate it with one example: Julia Fischer. After some excellent recordings with Pentatone (that are still among their best selling products), where she had almost a unique position as a star violinist, she moved to Decca under the very naive illusion that Decca would allow her to record with the best orchestras, not realizing that Decca, after having fired most of their artists under contract, only wanted to make sure that no serious competition affects the few that remained under contract. After making some fine recordings, mainly solo violin, without great orchestras, she left. Hence, the only way to listen to Julia Fischer today is either in the concert hall or if you suscribe to her paid channel.
Recordings were a sideline for classical musicians who long relied upon the box office for live performances. With the decline of the recording industry we have orchestras starting their own labels (without the quality control of performances that the old labels insisted upon). Unless one relies heavily upon recorded music, it is back largely to live performances.
As far as your influence, at least in my case, I now check your videos before I purchase. As an example, the 90 disc Naxos Beethoven box is arriving today. Other past purchases were made based upon your recommendation. Please do not downplay your contribution . You are providing a valuable service. Keep up the good work.
Dear Dave. Oddly enough, though I accumulated thousands through the years - I can't remember when I last put a CD into my poor player, since I switched to Streaming and MP3. The only alive-and-kicking discs I see nowadays are on your blessed channel! Keep going! Maybe you are the last man standing in the vanishing CD's universe
Regarding the record labels: "Shouldn't they go out and try to sell this stuff to someone else, besides me!" Made by laugh out loud. David, you and the other 12 people that buy these box sets, are public benefactors: "What can we get Dave Hurwitz to buy next?" must be emblazoned across the walls of many of the major record labels across the world. On a serious note, I'd love your thoughts on the emergence of streaming: the fact that your overflow room (and all your other rooms!) can now be available to anyone, with a subscription. Not your knowledge (alas!).
Great commentary, Dave. Thanks. The bright side is that you can get classical music from second hand merchants for little or almost nothing now; stuff you'll probably never find streaming. And, hey, this trend is inevitable; I mean, how many households curently have the greatest performances of King Ramses court players in their collection? It's all gone with the wind. Cheers!
Great talk s usual. I bought the large Toscanini "Furniture" box a number of years ago. I like listening to the performances and comparing them to more "modern" conductors. Much of the sound is very listenable and Toscanini performances are very worthwhile. I added many of the earlier Toscanini with the NY Phil - recordings from Naxos - some of them are very good and listenable. . Yesterday I was listening to the earlier Bruno Walter recordings with Vienna Phil...at the same time I bought the Toscanini box (these were recorded in the 1930s) - I was able to buy a large Walter collection ..pressing from Japan at a decent price....The CD box is only Japanese...but the CDs themselves are in English. The pressings are spectacular. David...I like listening to these old recordings ..many of them are very good and the sound is not bad. Example Walter's 1st act of Walkure...what a great performance. Keep up your videos...they are the best thing on RUclips. As always be well...jerel ( I have a massive CD collection..but adding stuff due to your recommendations).
I worked at BMG from 1992-95, the time in which the initial AT Edition was issued on CD, along with the piece of furniture display case. What I heard in the grapevine was that the Toscanini family (estate) was very upset that Furtwängler recordings were appearing on CD while few if any AT recordings were being issued on the new format. BMG then committed to issuing an AT Edition, BUT the bean counters insisted it be sold at midline. The AT family objected as they felt a lower price point would cheapen his legacy. Of course, BMG pointed out that AT’s legacy had already appeared on budget Victrola LPs. As a sop to the family, BMG came up with the display case idea. And - in a move equal to lighting your cigars with hundred dollar bills - they proposed to display a gold-embossed AT signature on the product. Not on the CDs mind you, but on the throw-away cardboard long-box outer wrap that housed early CDs for retail record bin display. And just to make it less cost effective, BMG contracted with the most expensive printer available to produce the throw-away boxes. Again, this is what I heard in the hallowed hallways of BMG. I am open to being corrected by anyone who has first-hand knowledge of the situation at the time.
Yes. There were a few CD's released in the late 80s by RCA but the remasterings were poor and I think the Toscanini family objected to the fact that they were on "Gold Seal" instead of "Red Seal." So then RCA went to work on the first box.
Why does Toscanini's family have anything to say about this? The issues are cultural responsibility, AT's contract with RCA, and Public Domain laws. Similarly, I never understood why Mahler's sorta-wife could hold up performing parts of the 10th Symphony. With all due respect to family values and domestic ties, of course.
@@davidaltschuler9687 - you answered your own question: contracts. After AT’s death, the contract became one between RCA and the AT estate. They had say over certain aspects of his legacy. You may be interested to know that Rachmaninoff’s contract with RCA specified that the English transliteration of his name end in two f’s, rather than a v or some other combination of letters. It is said that he felt this spelling better expressed how he wanted his name pronounced. That contract clause remained in full force when I was working at BMG in the mid nineties, decades after Rachmaninoff had passed away. BTW - there is no such thing as a public domain recording in the USA. All pre-1972 recordings enjoy copyright protection in the USA until 2065.
@@jfddoc - not true. The earliest AT releases were on Red Seal. The first version of the Complete AT Edition was on Gold Seal. The outer box and the B&W CD sleeves used in the second version of the CATE are branded with the Red Seal (yes, that box I got for $75). Go figure.
@@markstenroos6732 Thanks; makes sense, Mark. BTW, I enjoy your Amazon reviews. It's a shame that they cut out comments on reviews, eliminating what was a lovely opportunity for relationships between people of similar interests. Beginning to dislike that company intensely! All the best,
I was re-watching this video and this memory came to mind. I bought my 1st CD player in 1986, and when I went to "Peaches" (which had a very decent classical selection)to purchase my compact disc so I could listen to my new $135.00 CD player that afternoon. Without digging thru much I went straight for the classics that I grew up on(all which happened to be all Columbia Great Performances) Bernstein - Pictures, the Planets, firebird suite. Ormandy - Roman trilogy, organ symphony, Concerto for Orchestra. Szell - Till/death/don, beethoven 5/6, New World, Wagner without words. I looked pass all the new DDD recordings & picked up the classics.
I just found this video. I love it 💚 Just looking through the comments this is an intellectual community that can itself frighten the -let’a call it- the TikTok community where discussions are much briefer.
Your realism and justified bitterness about this loss of value of the object produced by the music industry, all of this is, in my opinion, central. Because you've once again raised the question of dematerialization and its implications. I'm always very dissatisfied with the way this issue is dealt with, generally by rejoicing in the digital shift of digital platforms. Because the question, as you put it, is enormous: the relationship you can have (and you illustrate this with your videos) with these cultural products is not just the relationship of a collector and a connoisseur, it's the very relationship that can be established between a human being and a cultural object in our hands. As I said, all this is central to the debate. A debate that would be fascinating to have live and not in writing, because it would take too much time and I'm not sure I'd be read. In any case, thank you for putting this essential debate into perspective for today's times and what has become of the transmission of the phonographic heritage of music.
Very interesting talk, David. I wonder how much piracy and file sharing has to do with the devaluation of music? I see a similar phenomena in film. The big Hollywood studios have largely stopped making low to medium budget films. They are concentrating on blockbusters, for the most part. There are many theories as to why, but one of the more prevalent ones is that films are pirated as soon as they are released, sometimes even earlier. So the studios may as well make as much money as possible right up front, to make it worth their while. Some of the big studios are still releasing their old catalog titles on BD, but most of them are licensing them out to smaller boutique labels that specialize in making product for media collectors, which is a niche market. MGM is a good example of that. There is just not enough money in old films, just like there probably isn't in old classical recordings.
Classical music is (at the same tie) trying to promote new artists covering mostly the same compositions while the older recordings still are masterpieces. In other genres you might get re-mastered versions of a classic rock album or a greatest hits or one made from unreleased tracks ... Classical music in a broad sense is a mess, layer upon layer or multiple versions of the same, trying to compete with other genres (when writing a new composition is not at all comparable to pop music production for ex.) .... eventually the industry will collapse, paying artists less and less and relying more and more on sponsors/gimmicks ... because people will become less interested. They already are, and they seems less interested in owning and more in streaming...
Why complain, when one can kvetch! 😁 To my great surprise, I read - in Heyworth's very detailled Klemperer-biography, I think it was - that Furtwängler and Klemperer had been to the same Toscanini concert, and when they some time afterwards met, they both raved about Toscanini's interpretations and especially about the tone and sonority, that he conjured! With the incredible advance in sound technology as demonstrated by f.ex. the SONY Szell and Walter boxes, we sorely need a new complete Toscanini box prepared along the same lines, with equal love and care, and with the same exquisite presentation!
This is a loaded topic. I am so frustrated that classical music won't rejuvenate itself before I die. I miss perusing classical titles at Tower and Borders and was beside myself when they went out of business. So, like everyone else, I get all my music from Amazon and ebay. WIthout them we would be in the dark ages. Is the situation the same in London and Europe? Do I have to travel to get my classical fix? I think Europeans still enjoy classical music and attend concerts and buy records. In the 60s and 70s when I was growing up the nuns and teachers played classical music in class and gave us rudimentary exposure to classical music. These days I don't think they teach music or the arts in schools. I feel like I live on a deserted island with no one around to talk to about my classical fix and I mean in person with the actual product to touch and feel, not on the internet. The sitaution is sad and depressing. Any positive words for me?
A very love having this compact toscanini box set. Such a treat to have such an embarrassment of riches. Toscanini a great conductor who stood for the right rigngs and a legacy undiminished with time. Perhaps the conductor i have read thr most about. Remarkablr figure.
As you say: There is no way to put that genie back in the bottle. The classical music industry has for the past thirty years basically been a mere specialist branch of the packaging industry. And as digital information doesn't need any packaging, there is no value to be extracted from what was once a product. And with younger people, the whole concept of "physically owning" a piece of information, such as a recording, just doesn't resonate anymore. For those of us who grew up with CDs or even vinyl, there is a sentimental attachment involved. Not for somebody who grew up with an iPod. I feel the shift myself: I'm paying 10 euros a month for my Spotify subscription and am a happier listener than I have ever been when I was still collecting stuff. If I could make any money by selling the better part of my several-K CD collection, I'd happily do so. But as you point out: Who'd pay anything for such relics from the dustheap of history?
I am of the "younger people" but I identify with the urge to "physically own" something. There's something intrinsically unappealing to me about just having an MP3 file on my desktop*: there is nothing there, no history, no memories except that of finding the file, nothing to touch or hold; contrariwise, I find it inherently appealing to be able to hold a CD (or an LP), to turn it over, to read the text on the case, the sleeve, or the booklet, to (in some cases) blow a bit of dust off of it, and slide it onto or click it into my player. The magic is in the ceremony of it all. I'm the same way with books; my library is far too large for the space I have... *Oftentimes, especially when dealing with seldom-recorded operas (e.g., Hasse's Leucippo) I am forced to go digital.
As I listened/watched, I was reminded of an excellent book by Joseph Horowitz: "Understanding Toscanini" which, after a fairly dense opening chapter, opens up into a fascinating, in-depth chronicle of RCA's MARKETING of Toscanini as a CULTURAL ICON, mainly through David Sarnoff's creation of the NBC Symphony and the RCA catalog of recordings. It's a real eye-opener, filled with little-known info..and very germane to the topic of this particular "Music Chat". (You'll even see a reproduction of an RCA 1977 Toscanini portrait "suitable for framing"; just "cut along the dotted line!" ) LR
Hello, I think there's a difference between commercial value and the a value as a recording and/or personal assesment value. I agree, commecial value is zero but for many collectors and enthusiasts, it is much more than it's commecial value! Great you mentioned it!
I used to buy and sell classical music during the boom during the 90s and only Naxos had the formula correct. Work on volume and offer a greater variety. The majors at the time were overpricing recordings that had made their money and were even public domain. Most classical music is public domain. Only the labels and those involved were making any money. Nevertheless, they were still pumping out Toscanini recordings at a premium price. Why?! I also was a guitar tech for rock bands and that would have been seen as totally counter intuitive within that genre. Even after the tech to produce CDs became cheaper, classical CDs went UP in some cases. Naxos bucked the trend and made a killing. I sold tons of Naxos. At one point, I sold 10 Naxos for every one CD from a major. His point about snobbery and arrogance is spot--- on!!! Having no clue how the industry worked also contributed.
Very interesting. I still watch these videos, even though I haven't purchased a CD in 15 years, and there are no stores in which to browse for hours. But it informs my RUclips searches. Even when I don't agree, I know,deep down, that Hurwitz is RIGHT!
I like to check Amazon prices on these sold out boxes every now and then... The Toscanini carton box is now at almost 500 USD, used. That's nothing when compared to the revered Monteux box that was available for a short time several years ago... That one is in the 4 digit realm by now. No idea if people pay those prices, but that's just crazy for an essentially budget release. Do they create this scarcity on purpose? However, I must say I'm drooling over that beautiful piece of furniture, Dave. Imagine what kind of wall-filler it would make if they made that for the Naïve Vivaldi edition... Very interesting video, by the way.
I purchased the Toscanini “Box” from amazon in June 2012 for all of $75. Brand new and factory sealed. My copy arrived undamaged. Maybe there’s something in the air, because I took The Box down off the shelf yesterday and looked through every CD to identify those that I am pretty sure have never gotten a listen in the past nine years. I’ll be having a mini Toscanini festival over the next few days that will NOT include the usual Beethoven, Brahms and Verdi…at least until the NEXT super-budget mega set shows up in the form of DG’s Karl Böhm Complete Orchestral Recordings, which will no doubt provide a distraction from my best-laid Toscanini plans. On edit: BTW - The Box included a 172-page booklet, 42 pages of which were taken up by articles in English by Harvey Sachs and Mortimer Frank (the other 130 pages are translations of the articles into other languages), so the liner notes weren’t totally jettisoned. And, one can always purchase the Sachs books on Toscanini as a supplement to the CD set.
@Mark Stenroos When my teenage nieces and nephews visit, they gawk at my collection of 100s of lp records and compact dics as if viewing dinosaurs in a museum.
My parents had a subscription to a classical music "album of the month" mail service for lp's when i was growing up in the 1980's. i dont know if it was columbia house or something else. I grew up with a Karajan "Great Symphonies" DG set. Of course i didnt know who the heck Karajan was growing up, only that he was the guy wit the white hair who was so caught up in conducting with his eyes closed on the outside picture of the box. What I did know was that those old lp's opened up my mind as a kid to wonderful musical worlds that i may have never found otherwise. I would come home from school and i would put on the record on the turntable and listen to stuff that i thought was mindlbowing. I lost track of how many times I listened to Beethoven's Eroica not even truly understanding who Beethoven was or Tchaikovsky's Pathetique!! Another all time favorite was Beecham's The Planets DG album--it was music that captivated me right from the very word go!! A cover that invited me to explore was Barenboim's The Sorcerer's Apprentice DG lp with a mysterious illustration of a young wizard sititing down and reading a spellbook by mooonlight. i was like "what the heck is this?" and then i put on the music and i was like --"whoa!!" Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhbition DG Karajan lp and Beecham's EMI Scheherazade lp were two others albums that must have very nearly worn out the needle on my family''s record player. Anyway, i guess what I'm trying to say was that Im grateful that my parents had that subscription service when i was a kid and Im grateful that the record industry tried to popularize classical music by offering such a service to the public. I would've never explored classical music had i not been exposed to it at home, since the 80's was the age of radio and great popular acts like Michael Jackson and Madonna were what was on the airwaves. I remember as a young man starting college and exploring NYC on my own how my mind was blown the first time i went to the Tower Records that was near to the college and discovered that they had a classical section. So many cd's and even an lp section!!! Anyway those times are well and gone. These days unless a parent deliberately has some classical tracks on their home computer listening list, most kids will never be exposed to it since in the highly personalized world of downloading tracks it is too easy to get lost only in what you already know. A service such as spotify will only recommend more of what you have already listened to. I wonder if in the age of digital if classical will ever achieve the heights it had during the cd era. It's such a shame you don't get liner notes with a digital release. So much of classical depends on being educated on the music, composer, and conductor or the performer.
I don't believe Beecham performed, or recorded, Holst's The Planets. Methinks the album which is your favorite was with William Steinberg conducting the Boston Symphony, with a very memorable cover and a very fine rendition. It was released by DGG in 1971. If your first hearing of The Planets was earlier than that, then it was probably Adrian Boult/New Philharmonia on Angel circa 1967 or even Karajan/Vienna Philharmonic on London circa 1959/60.
@@peacearchwa5103 Yes you are quite correct and I apologize for the error. It is especially frightful since i try to be careful wit these type of things, but occasionally the mind will slip. Thank you for having been courteous and magnanimous when pointing out my mistake as you could have easily torn me apart and with good reason-I may have been unintentionally sending people out to look for a non existing album!! The recording of The Planets i grew up listening to was the Karajan with the huge orange picture of Saturn on the cover (Voyager 1 and 2!!) on lp. For me that album defined The Planets growing up and in my mind it is still acts as a reference. It was so beautiful to listen to. At some point my parents got rid of all their lp's and it wasn't until i was an adult that i was able to get the same recording but on cd! Later i went on to collect other recordings of the work and I discovered the Steinberg recording on cd that you mentioned and it is definitely one of my faves!! 😄💿
I do appreciate a good presentation including a booklet/notes which I ALWAYS read! There is less of that. Also fewer operas including librettos. Sometimes they include a CD with the libretto, but I don't have a computer. I remember buying the Decca Sutherland/Bellini box which was very frugally packaged. No librettos and I was shocked that there wasn't even a picture of the Diva! Recently got some Astrid Varnay Wagner operas and was OK with no libretto....it's probably a matter of familiarity. I really try to steer away from buy operas without librettos if I'm less familiar with them.
Great talk, again! The labels package & repackage; one year something is remastered & delux packaged, the next it's in a discount series. It seems always to have been thus. I started serious listening & collecting at age 13 in 1972. Back then, Reiner, Szell, Ormondy, Markevitch, Silverstri & many others in that distinguished pantheon were licensed to cheap supermarket lines. I remain grateful! They were within reach of my schoolboy budget. The industry also carefully rationed its products; 2 or 3 Beethoven cycles by label, for example, if that. When CDs were introduced, many great performances by star conductors of the recent past or soloists no longer active were on cheap labels & EMI, to take one example, charged full price for the endless stream of Rattle & CBSO releases! Again, eternal gratitude for the decision, but when all the labels released their vast back catalogues onto CD (swathes of which were hitherto only available as rare & expensive collector's items) I wondered who on earth would buy new releases? Given the drooling choice, who in the 80s or 90s was really going to prefer Haitink, Rattle, Abbado et al? There's a devaluing of the product & a program of releasing tantalising older product that renders most current production almost futile. I cannot remember when I last purchased a new CD. But then I vastly prefer live concerts & hope I am a better informed & more enthusiastic listener because of the comparative base afforded by an embarrassingly large archive of recordings collected over my whole life! And the collecting is a work in progress.
I use Apple music (not promoting, you could do the same with spotify) , it's really the best thing in the world...i have access to basically every work/recording you've talked about in this channel and with amazing lossless quality (or even higher if you care/can tell the difference)...it really is a dream and hard to believe ...maybe too good to be sustainable for the industry...but ill ride this wave as long as I can
@@warrenj3204 Brahms: yes. Mahler: yes. Delius: yes. Beethoven - maybe? There’s a couple of recordings of the Nash playing the Septet, but on Erato. It has almost everything I want to listen to, including quite specialist things. It won’t have particular versions of historical recordings (Marston etc) and some very recent prestige recordings won’t have all the tracks licensed (eg Trifonov Bach Art of Fugue, Kolesnikov Goldbergs, Harnoncourt Haydn Paris Symphonies :(. But usually you can buy those off iTunes.
@@warrenj3204 For the record Hyperion is not on any streaming service though I believe they do sell digital recordings on Apple Music. They're one of the few holdouts (ECM, which had a lot of contemporary recordings, capitulated a few years ago). When I talk with younger listeners Hyperion records are among the most pirated- they don't want to mail-order physical CDs which may or may not be in print.
@@warrenj3204 If a label cooperates with a streaming service at all, it usually means they'll dump their entire catalogue. So if you can find one Decca recording on Spotify (or Apple or whatever, I'm not trying to sell you anything), you'll find every Decca recording there. A few specialty labels refuse to participate in that race to the bottom, Hyperion probably being the most important one. For basically everything else, I'd just say: Get a subscription and if indeed it happens that you don't find a specific recording that you are looking for, you can still get the CD. But for just browsing repertoire and comparing versions, streaming platforms are heaven. They have entirely changed my music consumption.
I would argue that the actually dead primephonic, and idagio, are way better platforms, i just use apple music because i still have 7 months for free, after that i will only continue if they make a good platform for classical music, as they promised. If doesn't, they do simply killed primephonic for nothing.
It's horrible use streaming services like apple music and spotify, mostly because their search engines are pure trash. I can take 5 to 10 minutes just to find a single recording.
Hello, great video! Today is the first time I've seen you and your videos, and by coincidence I picked up a rock CD today from a Billboard Top 10 artist, and they wanted you to scan a QR code to go online for the liner notes/details. Two measly pieces of paper have been cut from the budgets and now I can't tell who recorded/mixed/mastered the album without going online. It's bonkers in my opinion. Also, if you have the time, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on my "Il Mondo al Rovescio" by Gli Incogniti review video. Cheers, Alex
With many years in record retail, and many more before and after that of collecting classical recordings, I think the industry at one point did figure it out, at least for a while. When major labels started reissuing older recordings on their budget lines, like Seraphim, Odyssey, etc., I think it worked to introduce mainly younger people to great music in an affordable way. Nonesuch issued some fine European recordings on a their very inexpensive label.What distinguished all of these reissues is that they took the music seriously. They were cheap to buy, but they looked like something worth investigating. Many had worthwhile liner notes, texts for vocal music, etc. Once hooked on the music, we moved on to full price recordings. I was very cynical about the crossover craze that started sometime in the 60s (I think). Some of those records sold really well, but I question whether they succeeded in getting people interested enough to explore the rest of a composer's work (if that was even their intention). Your're right, the endless re-packaging of recordings cheapens their apparent (apparent!) value. I also think the advent of the CD opened up a vast treasure trove to collectors and neophytes. I think at that time Classical went up to 5% of the market, but was it all too overwhelming for many of us? Was the market saturated with 119 recordings of a Beethoven symphony? You hit the nail on the head when you say, "let's face it. Classical is elitist" Yes, as you point out, much of it requires close attention, concentration and a learned ability to follow a piece that's longer than a pop song. It's never going to be for everyone. And that's ok. We are LUCKY, we're so fortunate to have discovered this world of incredible music, to get to know it so well and have it as a major part of our lives for as long as we're capable of hearing it.
Agreed. Not all media is destined to be consumed by the masses. What percent of the population has ever read War and Peace? Well, the similarities to classical are striking. The book is exceedingly long. The book is written in challenging language. The book requires an understanding of historical background. The book is intricate and requires attention to detail.
The industry may well have shot itself in the foot, but up and coming listeners like me were very grateful for the large amount of quality recordings we were able to buy for not a lot of money (though it still seems a lot if you're poor)... Perhaps the worst result of the bargain box approach was that it undermined new releases. Why would I follow a symphony cycle disc by individual disc, or collect the hundreds of "new faces" recordings containing the same well-worn repertoire, when I could buy an historical box for less than the price of a new single release? From this perspective, the future of the industry must lie in unfamiliar repertoire. And given the inevitable mediocrity of most new music (inevitable purely from a statistical standpoint), this means a focus on reviving forgotten and overlooked composers of previous centuries. By the way, thanks to your mention of Joseph Martin Kraus in a previous video, I have been doing my part to support the industry by starting to assemble a little Kraus collection.
Yeah, i do understand that difficult about prices. For me is mostly because i live in a developing country where most of the recordings came from the U.S or Europe. We have a huge disparity of value between currencies, almost 6:1, here you are lucky if you get a good cycle of Mahler for 1/4 of a salary, if not half of the salary.
Not sure that RCA et al had much choice. All this material was entering Public Domain, and CDs allowed easy, high quality copying. Better to make some money than no money on your assets of diminishing value. And classical music has been sidelined in the West, with a shrinking % of the population introduced to it; the slack being taken up on Asia. (Gotta love those Bernstein concets with teens running to their seats dressed in suits.) I miss reading high quality essays, but many of those discount Editions and Cubes (especially by owenrs of RCA & Columbia) are beautifully done and respectful of the recorded legacy. Frankly, I love having a remastered complete collection with old art work for a low price/CD. There are cultural losses, as you described here, but wonderful gains for the consumer as well. We are having a lot of unexpected fun and opportunity while losing this war.
Why should the Szell box ever go out of print? Manufacturing LPs was a labor intensive process and required constant monitoring and quality control. Compared to this, the cost of producing CDs is infinitesimal. Even the cardboard boxes, inner sleeves and booklets cost a lot less. It's all done by computers. How hard/expensive can it be to order up a new batch of Szell boxes?
That's not the only measure of profitability. You have to factor in the cost of keeping inventory and the rate of turnover compared to other, more marketable products by the same company. If a set like that could be produced on demand, it would be a different matter, but it can't be, and it probably makes no sense for the label to sit on any quantity when everything in the industry is trending towards reducing the footprint of physical plant and facilities.
I agree. So let’s all hope these mega box sets eventually come back to us in downloadable format. No carbon footprint. No paper. No printing. And we all get to hear what we want to here.
I would rather buy a single disc with really cool graphics, great liner notes and awesome sound than box sets. I remember growing up looking through bins of albums at the local record store. In fact the first LP I bought as a teenager, was Andre Previn with The LSO doing the Berlioz Overtures. The cover (with the famous pic of Berlioz conducting a bombastic orchestra) said buy me, there's something special about this release. Those days are gone. And I think it's sad that music that is seen as elitist, has been so cheapened as David points out. But this music should never seen as just for the very few. It should speak to everyone and be marketed to everyone.
If one is to do what makes classical music commercially viable one must have a certain modicum of learning. By definition, even for an Italian, a huge chunk of opera is in some exotic language. Then of course many masterworks have no catchy titles, so semi-literate people can rarely know about this music (which itself is good reason for making formal education more rigorous) This is not a knock on country music which has little crossover appeal to classical fans, but it is far easier to market Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, or Johnny Cash to semi-literate people than it is to market Mozart's glorious string quintets to semi-literate people. Classical music sold well in college towns when it was available, but not so well in places at the low end of social demographics. The record labels selling classical music had to educate people about the music. As an example, Carl Nielsen left obscurity and entered the repertoire about thirty years, and record labels needed to pump him to sell his music. That is possible only when labels put out the effort. Unless one transmutes classical music into vulgar crossovers or barbarous adaptations (Rheingold, the dry beer, is my beer! to a good but otherwise-obscure waltz) one cannot cheapen it. It is possible to do classical music badly, which is far worse than trying to expand an audience by mentioning that Schubert or Tchaikovsky wee homosexuals (that J S Bach and Bartok were straight should in no way trouble LGBT people. The heyday of the marketing of classical music to mass audiences was quite possibly the late 1970's, when record labels used much the same marketing techniques that they were using to sell rock albums, even to the extent of conflating George Solti to Jimi Hendrix in cover art. I have no problem with that. Classical album sales declined as college education became fiendishly expensive and college graduates often became indentured servants with huge debts to pay off, often by working two cr@ppy jobs just to avoid becoming homeless and hungry. People so living -- if one can call that "living" -- lack the time to dedicate to listening to extended classical works on recordings, let alone buying them. That is more economics than music. By the way -- the last forty years have been a miserable time in which to be a young adult due to low pay, high rents, bloated costs of education, and low glass ceilings in the bureaucracies that hire debt-laden college grads.
That dsc isavailable on a box set containing the entire Previn segment of the old Angel/EMI (now on Warner). I have suggested that one could have a very strong collection by having this and George Szell's similar-sized CBS (now Sony) collection. The two were very different conductors and better fit different repertory, so there is little overlap...and few duds that you would need to supplement. There would be gaps to fill, but those would be obvious. Previn's box has reproductions of the classy covers.
Streaming services hate their listeners and just want their money, period. Spotify is impossible to use without premium considering the constant ads and limit to the amount of songs you can look at lyrics for.
Brilliant. Sad and pathetic situation as you say but you had me laughing repeatedly. There was also the "Immortal Toscanini," the series of touted remasterings, re-equalized with some added sonic ambience, some very good and some crappy and careless. That series was never even finished, I believe, and amounted to a dozen releases. But not one properly curated and annotated release of NEW material. Nothing like the beautiful c. 1961 LP first release of the Philadelphia Schubert 9th in a Soria series box and booklet with fine illustrations and everything you'd want to know about the recording, Schubert and the work itself. P.S. I never got, could never lay my hands on, the furniture even though I'd bought the Gold Seal CDs as they came out. Today I received the Warner 55 CD Furtwangler cube (not even a proper box) and not overwhelmed by the packaging. With the Ormandy mono box you do get a great book and original jackets, front and back (notes often surprisingly readable!) and that took somebody caring.
Despite the fact the Classical Music Industry is self destroying in the end for me it comes down to personal pleasure. Desert island listening beats corporate purgatory any day !
A couple of things. At least the stuff I have been getting from Amazon for the last year or so has been for the most part properly packaged and arrived without damage. Indeed the damage I have experience has been the result of not paying attention when using a knife to open the surrounding package. Jewel cases on the other hand almost always come damaged. To David’s point, I think the most serious damage to the classical music industry was caused by the introduction of digital sound. 90 years ago Columbia Records introduced the laminated 78 disc proclaiming reproduction “without the scratch.” In my opinion, only recently have rather expensive units been able to reproduce “Red Book” CDs without the SCREECH. Perhaps these comments were slightly off topic but gee this is fun!
Quick tangential question for you Dave: you highlighted the Sachs book; have you considered periodically doing classical music book recommendations on the RUclips channel? Thanks for another compelling video!
Historical note - the first Columbia long playing records issued in 1948-50 were sold for 4.85 dollars each, which alters the price comparison considerably. These early discs would cost more like 50 dollars in today's money; still a saving on the equivalent 78 set, but not down to the level of the almost-given-away aspect depicted here. The English RUclips site 'Techmoan' has a very well written episode - 'Battle Of The Speeds' - which explains all this. .
When it comes to books I have often a choice between the same classic in paperback or in a limited edition beautifully illustrated and printed on high quality stock bound superbly and priced accordingly. The content is the same but I know which edition values that content most. I know which I will cherish. With recordings I do not have that choice. Even your cabinet of Toscanini was just the same basic CDs in a better setting. In the days of 78's you had a choice of the full symphony often bound as an album or the separate discs in cardboard covers. With LPs some companies tried hard to give their product value such as RCA with their Soria series (Beecham's Messiah with tipped in illustrations printed in Switzerland - and that was the cheaper alternative to the even more luxurious limited edition). Remember the Archive boxes from DG with cloth bound boxes, beautifully printed notes the size of the box and even a card for your files with recording notes? I still have mine because they are individually things of beauty and vale both in themselves and in what the recordings hold. (Glad you still favour as a reference the Richter B Minor Mass but the original box of LPs totally outclasses its present wretched presentation). The problem began with CDs as nobody seems able to produce editions eschewing the nasty plastic fall to pieces cases. Hopefully there are companies in the Classical world who will take a leaf out of the Pop world and issue truly special limited editions although I do note that to do so some of those have reverted to vinyl!
A simplification of one side of the story: Back in the day record companies were owned by music lovers. Or at least those who liked music! In fact, once rock n roll started to sell in large numbers and classical sales ebbed (and to some extent, jazz, too), that the record companies used the money from huge sales of rock to in a way subsidize the classical music industry. It was “the right thing to do”. They felt that as record company owners it was keeping the music they loved in print and available.But record popular (rock, etc.) sales became TOO big, and so the corporations thought, as they usually do, “if we can’t beat our competition, we’ll buy them”. And so they did. Now record companies were controlled by their boards, who didn’t care about music, they cared about profits. And that’s where the story of the classical music industry’s downfall got even worse - not to mention that classical (and their audience) was stuck in the dead European white man composer zone. Plus not to mention that Apple invented iTunes before the record them, as the record corporations were fighting a losing battle with digital downloads. Their fingers in the digital dike was a bad idea. Now rock music has Bandcamp, live shows, and merch. The record companies have Adele and country music. And classical music doesn’t have shit.
I recall that, when the complete Toscanini recordings were first issued on CD, Wanda Toscanini was enraged that they were sold as budget rather than full-priced CD's. Earlier, there was the Franklin Mint Toscanini edition, with luxurious, thick red-vinyl LP's and booklet autographed by Wanda.
I have memories of the first complete Rubinstein edition in the 90s (?) that came in some kind of suitcase and was really expensive. When the next version came out in the big red box it was more affordable but not available in any local shops. Amazon and the French post office did everything to ensure it was impossible to get a non-dinged box...
I agree with a lot of what you said here, David, but I think you're overlooking some of the facets of steaming services. You don't get physical product but you DO get a lot of important features. Just being able to pick almost anything ON DEMAND is incredibly valuable as is eliminating the need to store and sort the physical product. If I have the choice between streaming a recording or looking for it in my collection, digging it out and putting it in a device to play, I invariably choose streaming. Now the streaming services could do so much more to increase the value of the recordings. For example, there is no reason they couldn't include those amazing liner notes on-line that you often get with physical product. They can also include detailed information about the recording that is essential for historical recordings.
I don't know why everyone assumes I have a negative view of streaming services. I don't. I don't use them, but that's only because I have so much physical product sitting around. I think they are wonderful for anyone who doesn't have lots of space and money, etc. I am merely describing what has happened to to the industry, and I'm not pessimistic about it at all. It will survive in some form or other and to be honest I don't especially care which, as long as the music remains available to those who want it.
As I'm a Marxist from way back, I remember reading where Groucho said, "For $1.50 I can get you a recording of 'Minnie The Moocher ' and for another 2 bucks I can get you Minnie".
Thank you for a good, thought provoking video. Surely one of the problems is that for Warners, Universal etc, classical music is tiny part of their turnover, so there is no incentive to do anything more than make a quick buck? I enjoyed the podcast with Rob Cowan on Furtwängler. By the way, happy 100th birthday Malcolm Arnold.
I would like to add that there are now online releases where you cannot even figure out what recording it is that they are selling. For example Sony has some online Richter releases. But no date and no place, so you don't even know what recording it is of the many he made of each piece. How can someone that cares enough to know Richter buy that?
David on the cheapo product, around 17:30: “the only thing they could give you less than this… is a digit!” I momentarily heard this as digit = finger, like the record companies are flipping you the bird 😂😂😂
Hi Mr. Hurwitz. First of all excuse me for my bad English. I think a big problem for these kind of sound recordings is simply that the copyright expired. And, since there are NO master tapes to guarantee a better quality transfer and remastering, anyone with a good source (I mean a well preserved 78 rpm disc) has the right to publish the recording, previously "polishing" the sound by means of some kind of software. So RCA has to face the various Naxos, Orfeo, etc. who publish the exact SAME recordings, sometimes in "superior" sound. Just my humble opinion, of course.
There is a key point in the killing of Classical music. It was when Clive Davis gave a presentation to the powers that be at Columbia emphatically stating that Classical music did not provide even a smidgeon of ROI. Columbia, subsequently followed by RCA, London/EMI, Capitol, stopped studio recordings among other budgetary cuts. For a long time after that, we were subjected to live recordings complete with coughs, comparatively poorer sound with odd balances. The moto was cut, cut, cut expenses. Not only that, but behind the scenes, technical development stalled. In the 1950s, RCA developed 3-channel recording so the engineers could get a better mix for mono and eventually stereo. London/Decca immedially followed with the microphone "tree" comparable to RCA's "mic ring". RCA was designing and manuacturing their own microphones, mixers, tape decks, speakers etc. I remember one of the last boards in 1975, it had 40 channel mic inputs, 16 channels for live mix down to 8 channels which was sent to two RCA 2" tape decks. All of that technical development stopped. Marketing to the elite happened a few years after stereo LPs. Remember the 99 cent supermarket stereo discs, many of which were classical music? After the thrill of stereo wore off, that was when Clive stepped and killed the classical recording industry.
Call me a heretic, but I buy CDs *only* for the music they contain, not for who's performing it or what the packaging looks like. The performer is only relevant (to me) in distinguishing between recordings (so, I can listen to Klemperer's King Stephan or Bernstein's, for example). I go further: any CD I buy gets immediately ripped to hard disk and split into individual compositions. So the fact that the record company combined Beethoven's 5th and 6th onto one physical disk is irrelevant to me: I end up with two compositions in two separate folders on the hard disk. That said, I see the point you're making and I certainly see that it makes sense, for people who are physical-medium-centred. But for me, I'd rather my music came as pure music, not as pieces of furniture! And for notes, texts, schorlarly insight... well, there's the rest of the Internet and the purchasing of scholarly books. I also happen to think cheap 'complete' box sets are an excellent way to entice new listeners into 'the gang' of classical music afficionados! So, if they've turned it into a 'worthless' commodity (i.e., a really cheap one) that seems like a good thing to me!
Once more your thoughts are very sobering. It does seem to be a case of diminishing returns and that happens with pop and rock and jazz as well. Recent CD reissues of old Bob Dylan albums do not have much in the way of information while previous reissues do so much more as - for example - who is on the record, and some informational detail - so usually with classical pop or jazz, I try to buy older editions knowing that I have something to read as well as listen. I have the Karajan complete Beethoven which is full of fascinating analysis and the cheap Brilliant Classics set with Blomstedt. The latter set is just the discs in cardboard sleeves and nothing else which may be forboding to a newcomer to the music. Mind you I did find the Karajan in a thrift store for less than a tenner. Hopefully, the independents like Naxos, Nimbus, Hyperion, etc will learn from the mistakes of the majors.
Death by cd ! I have most of the cds I would like to have. I am your age. The youngsters will get downloads. It is mostly on RUclips but I like to buy cds of my favourite 20th century mostly German/Austrian type music before it sells out, some of it on CPO or Capriccio, be it Wetz, Pepping, Schoenberg, Korngold, Pfitzner, Zemlinsky, Weill, Eisler, Schoeck, Schulhof, Pavel Haas, Ullman.. It all has musical value. For years Ring cycles were very expensive.
So interesting, thanks again David. You are a national treasure, or as Austrians say a „Wunderwuzzi“ (wizz kid). By the way, do you think you could find time to make a little talk about the former Minnesota orchestra and NYPO conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos? In 1997 a Greek newspaper in collaboration with the label Discantus issued a 50xCD set, stretched from the very early Minnesota years till the later NY MET ones. Some gems were Brahms 1. piano concerto with William Kapell, major violin concertos with Francescatti, Milstein and Elman and magnificent opera performances,l: Walküre with Harshaw as Brünnhilde, Ballo with Peerce, Milanov and Marian Anderson. I never liked his Beethoven, as I find it too romantic and “Mahler colored” for my ears. I prefer the classical straight way of Szell, Böhm or even better Schmidt-Isserstedt and Klecki. Have a great week!
There are surely good sides to this, I don't have that much money to spend on recordings, and I have been able to buy boxes of the complete works of Haydn, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc., for less than (and sometimes quite a bit less than) £100, sometthing that would never have been remotely possible in the period of vinyl LPs.
I guess I'm part of the problem. I used to buy CD's but now for $20 a month me and my whole family get unlimited Apple Music. Apple does great job and has almost everything recommended here. Now I listed to 100% classical but I doubt the artists are making much from me. As I understand it Classical Music listeners account for only 1% of the streaming music customers. What I find odd is that Apple bought a premium classical music streaming service Primephonic. I presume this is because the Apple user interface is so terrible for classical music. Maybe, hopefully, they use the Primephonic acquisition to offer a premium experience for that 1%. I would certainly pay a premium price for such a thing.
I had no idea that furniture thing existed. I assume there will be another super premium Toscanini box someday with another pass at the mastering but maybe these are as good as we can expect. So here's a question: What's the largest classical box set ever released? (largest in number of discs, not largest piece of furniture)
I think the advent of music streaming sites, which require a monthly subscription only, has also played a part in devaluing Classical Music. These days people can easily pick and choose what they want to listen to, and millennials in particular want to hear something instantaneous and unchallenging. Whatever way you look at it, listening to music via a streaming service is not quite the same as physically owning the CD. Another reason why classical music is not as popular is simply because of the way in which it was recorded. Most folks these days prefer to listen to music through their headphones. They prefer music that was recorded in a studio rather than for live performance (as they want to hear crystal sharp instruments in both ears), whereas Classical Music tends to stick to the acoustic format mostly favoured by theatrical (live) audiences. This is especially true of classical music that was recorded many years ago. I personally have no problem listening to the old recordings, but I think you'll find most modern listeners do.
Record company corporate mergers have changed the equation for issuing classical music. I don't know what the global percentage of physical album sales is for classical product, but it's likely smaller than in the 1980s and primarily focused in China, Japan and other areas of Asia where Western classical music has developed a certain following. Speaking of squeezing money out of ancient intellectual property, did you know that shortly after Sony acquired BMG/RCA, Sony proceeded to sell the "Victrola" brand name to Innovative Technologies, which sells a variety of low-cost record players marketed under the name of -- you guessed it -- "Victrola"!
Nowadays I can go to a used music store and buy used classical CDs in mint condition for anywhere from 50 cents to five dollars per disc. I often walk out with 20 discs for $10. If I am patient and can wait for a month or two, the price on the $5 discs will come down to $2, and eventually to 50 cents. I never buy used discs unless they are in mint condition.
Mr. Hurwitz, you are often critical of historical recordings with antique sound quality not being optimal performances of essential works. Where does Toscanini place on your scale of historical merit vs. recording merit?
I think they sound fine. My standard is simple and has objective and subject components. Objectively, does the recording capture the music with reasonable accuracy and fidelity based on what I see in a score, and subjectively, can I hear what I know (or believe) I ought to hear based on my knowledge of the piece? Whether a disc is "historical" or not doesn't really matter. What matters is the standard. That's why older recordings of chamber, solo keyboard, or vocal music are often more tolerable than those of orchestral music. I think a very large number of Toscanini recordings are just fine.
Hello David! I like to think of the hole picture. From before beethoven when only people from aristocracy could listen to music, until now. Passing through the xx century where at some point people with money could listen to music buying an LP or CD. The cd and L.p. made a hole industry generate millions, but it's mabe just a step of the hole process of democratization of the access to music. Nowadays, you don't even need the money to bye the Cd. You can just pay 9 dollars to Spotify and listen to it all! It's fantastic!! The problem is that there is no money In the industry so people can not compose... play... direct as a professional . And the artistic level can go down the road!! Anyway... Mozart also gave a lot of lessons and composed afterwards. So it's possible to have a paying bills job and dedicate soulfully to the art in your other moments... To finish with a statistic. Spotify gives you the monthly listeners. Bernstein: 1.23 million; Toscanini: 11000; Justin bieber 85 million Greetings!!!
Dont forget while they issued the cheap boxes, they came out with some thirteen duos of "remastered" Toscanini recordings. And, the beethoven symphonies made up the first three in that series. As someone who grew up listening to Toscanini on LP (budget), and who bought the whole edition peace meal, there is yet another way I would like to see the series offered: in TERMS OF THE SOUND..... There are many Toscanini recordings that had quite good mono sound, and many that had quite poor sound. What is the point of offering new listeners to classical music or toscanini some of the recordings where much of the music is missing. How will that spur people to listen further. But what to call it??? How about: Toscanini: the remastered, and Toscanini: the Legacy.
If I had the funds, I would snatch up the rights of some great recordings from defunct indie labels and release them for $4.99 a pop. If I was a major, I'd be peddling them for $3.99-4.99 in mini cardboard "record jackets". Classical buyers are willing to keep it afloat. The industry just needs to apply a little effort and innovation. I'm pretty sure many recordings that Jascha Heifetz, Horowitz, Gould and the like would fly off "the shelves" at that price. To be honest, I really could care less about throwing $15-20 at another new performance of the Beethoven violin concerto or Mozart Symphony.
Sadly, I am now seeing the film industry turning hard media into a boutique medium. What they want to charge for a Vincent Price film on Bluray that has sold, literally, thousands upon thousands of copies on DVD is just stupidity. It actually harms interest. When I saw them trying to peddle mediocre films on Bluray for $20 or more that one could find in the DVD bins at Wal-Mart for $5 or less, I realized the consumer was getting dumber and these distributors were getting greedier. Thankfully, some are starting to realize how dumb they have been.
I must admit I've become addicted to cheap box sets. It would be hard to go back to paying $30 a cd. I will pay extra for a high resolution download though. That's a way record companies can still value add to their product new and old. Perhaps that's the future.
Why will you buy the next Toscanini edition, Dave? You're just encouraging them. Concentrate on stuff that hasn't been released even ONCE, or stuff that a few people who would like if they knew about it would buy it. Like Nielsen, for example or Malcolm Arnold or all those 20th century Amercan symphonists like David Diamond or Walter Piston or Howard Hanson? (NOT William Schuman, though, thanks!). 🙂 There is still good, honest work to be done by people like you! TEN-HUT!!
It's probably already been brought up in the fulsome comments here, but I remember the first Toscanini CDs being in the mid-'80s pressed in Japan but sold in the US with these ugly grey covers and they sounded like crap. The ones you show with the black and white and gold embossed logo I always considered to be the second phase in the reissuing of his stuff - albeit more complete.
and of course - are we, as record collectors and listeners blameless? having been around with people recommending recordings- nobody in their right mind would recommend you buy the $999 Karajan box - they'd be telling you things like how good the Sony Essential Classics line which gave you recordings from people like Ormandy and Szell for dirt cheap was. You'd always hear about how good Naxos was- the no-frills packaging even made us feel cool, because we were making a statement that all that mattered was the music on the disc. We always want the good stuff for cheap because we care about the music, and (supposedly) not the packaging! Incidentally, I poke around LP shops for old classical because it's fun to collect and listen to - do you remember the RCA Soira boxes? Beautiful packaging, looking more like a first edition of a literary masterpiece than an album. The booklet touted that it was printed with some luxury paper stock from a company in Italy somewhere, and the LPs were hefty, thick pieces of vinyl. Just beautiful- though I wonder what they cost in today's money.
Actually, while the Naxos packaging might not be the most imaginative, the label actually treats the music better than most majors. You always get comprehensive notes, intelligently written. Texts and translations of vocal works are available on line, or in the booklet. The product has that most essential of qualities: honesty. And as I said in the talk, the difference between $5 and $15 or even $20 may be significant to you in terms of the quality of stuff you can buy, but as a general determinant of the "class" of product into which recorded music falls, it is irrelevant. It's all cheap entertainment.
@@DavesClassicalGuide off topic but half the reason I buy old opera LPs are the booklets. I simply can't do electronic librettos- I don't want to look at a smartphone when listening to music, and CD booklets are just too small. I bought an old RCA set with live recordings of Strauss (Astrid Varnay in Elektra caught my attention) and they even included the actual Met libretto- beautiful modernist design with that old Met logo and the title in Helvetica, straight out of the most hip late 60s modernist style guide imaginable.
The sound quality of a CD is a lot better than that of vinyls, 96dB of dynamic range, 22kHz worth of audio, better stereo image, compare that with the vinyl with a mere 60 to 70dB of dynamic range, only about 12kHz of audio and less of a stereo image - same goes for cassette tape. An MP3 at the normal bitrate of 128kbps can outstrip that.
@@johnb6723 oh yes, not to mention that classical is uniquely sensitive to surface noise, as it has far more musically important quiet sections than most popular music. Still, LPs are fun to collect- and cheap, unlike popular LP prices these days!
Perhaps the music labels should create a music appreciation curriculum that can be provided to school districts for free that incorporate their recorded legacies. That way, if students are interested, they can be introduced to classical music and become potential buyers in their own right.
Music, generally has become almost literally worthless-an enormous amount of it available for a relatively low monthly cost. I think the only major label which doesn't stream is Hyperion, and guess what label I see the classical kids pirating the most? The only way people will pay over $10 for an album anymore is if it's sold as a luxury product (vinyl), or if they're supporting the artist specifically (Bandcamp)
If Music HQ is no longer going to do it, that means they're DOING SOMETHING ELSE, something not publicly known yet. Either that, or they're preparing to go bankrupt...
I think it is because those who purchased the furniture would not spend a fortune to buy another furniture with the same stuff. If the record company wants to squeeze out more earnings from the same recordings, they need to come up with a cheaper product to attract different types of buyers. The Japanese found another way to earn money by selling the same stuff on sacd, xrcd, lpcd, shmcd, dvd-audio, bluray-audio, 24k gold disc, etc. I think it all comes down making money and staying alive.
I can listen on a streaming site and RUclips Premium to almost every one of the recordings you cite. I couldn't do that if I had to pay fifteen bucks an hour for plastic. Cheaper classical music is more accessible classical music. Sure, very cheap things can be misused, but some people thought radio and recordings diminished music. Do libraries and online books reduce the value of literature? A library card will get you stacks of online music. Then really, what have platters in boxes, cardboard sleeves and glass-fronted shelves to do with the vibrations that are the sound of music? Suppose it came in bottles. Would an expensive Venetian blown-glass bottle better represent Toscanini's Beethoven than a pop bottle? Now that the arbitrary limitations of manufacture, distribution and retail have vanished the vast body of recordings is always present. Classical music is not cheap because owner/producers debased it, but because it can’t be sold any other way. You did say that. After sixty years pretending it wasn’t happening we have to accept that the “classical" repertoire began around 1750 and stalled at 1960. Gubaidulina is great, but for the public she’s no Grieg. Between 1992 and 2004 I owned The Magic Flute, one of Vancouver B.C.’s two best-stocked classical CD stores. It went out of business in 2006, a victim of the fall in the cost (not aesthetic value obviously) of the “product” (ugh), high rents and high property taxes. People had replaced their record collections, the rarefied repertoire didn’t sell (say, one Gubaidulina to five hundred Grieg), the community of interest shrank and online access was clearly on its way. As to two square feet of furniture holding zeros and ones, space is super-expensive in many places. Notes are a loss, but a huge amount of information is online, and IDAGIO is beginning to include the specific notes. But hey, something is up, online sites and magazines are stuffed with reviews of new CD’s. Online sales make a market out of people spread very far apart. The luxury presentations of such as Palazzetto Bru-Zane are marvellous, and there is no reason why there should not exist a market for such things. But they are not the way most people are going to access music. I don’t feel sad about any of this. I can spend my declining years listening to everything stacked on those enormous shelves behind you.
I think equally cheapening the product is the onslaught of classical albums that present classical music as nothing more than musical wallpaper with things called 'music to relax by', Mozart for babies, 100 romantic piano classics...
The first result on youtube for Mozart's Requiem ( with the most views, 100 million) is a shitty edited version of the work (like 9 minutes long) ...fucking pathetic...
I disagree, because in the case of these "dumbed down" collections, the people buying them are not going to buy "serious" releases if the other stuff is unavailable.
When I was 12 years old, I asked my mother to buy a 99 cent (or was it 49 cent? - this was the early '60s) vinyl LP of "The Most Beautiful Classical Music" at the A&P Supermarket (the same place where we bought our Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia).
The music was mostly boring, but I fell in love with one selection: Bruch's Adagio (that's how it was identified).
When I got a bit older I went to a department store and paid $2 for a Victrola LP with Bruch's Violin Concerto No.1 in G Minor played by Jaime Laredo.
I was hooked on classical music.
@@anthropocentrus I checked it out: simply HORRID! Do people think think they are listening to a _complete_ unfinished masterpiece? This must be the ultimate in dumbing down.
My main local classical radio station is going this way. Single movements out of context with the larger work, programs like “Night Music” which is all mellow adagios, the occasional Beethoven’s 9th which is so quick-tempoed that I have to wonder if it was specifically commissioned to be played in under an hour so they can program everything in neat hourly blocks (if they aren’t just launching into the Ode To Joy right at the middle, when the full chorus returns after the lengthy instrumental section, which I have heard them play)… it’s awful sometimes.
Dear Mr. Hurwitz, your videos are a blessing for the classical music lover! Keep up the good work! We need it...
A fascinating discussion of the political economy of the recording industry. This is worth 26 mins of anyones time.
It’s interesting that classical music is more accessible than ever. One can access an immense number of recordings virtually for free (they are free to listen to on RUclips). At the same time, it seems to be valued less. There was a time when Leonard Bernstein was giving scholar lectures and concerts on commercial television. It’s unimaginable in today’s cultural environment that such a thing would be commercially viable. Does even PBS do such broadcasts anymore? In the 70s and 80s, Denver had a COMMERCIAL classical radio station, ie a station that could actually make money broadcasting classical music. It has long since disappeared, along with many other such stations across the country. I doubt that the rise of the Internet had anything to do with the decline, but it’s at least good to know that it’s providing an alternative outlet (along with satellite radio). How does one compute the percentage of the population that actually listens to and appreciates classical? Kudos to David for not being a snob, including a vinyl snob.
That is a valuable point. One can consider the Internet bringing a problem of “google”-ility. How do you find a song today? How do you google something abstract?
One can also consider the shattered attention span or the lack of incorporation in general education?
Just some thoughts from a classical flautist.
What's surprising is that PBS still exists. Everything is on RUclips.
Dave: This may well be your most interesting and insightful talk yet. You hit the nail on the head--that is, the many nails that have gone into the coffin of the classical record industry. I have to confess that, even though an AT fan, I passed on the shelf edition. Too expensive. But I snapped up the box when it came out. The irony is that, as another of your commentators confessed, I have nver listened to a single CD in that collection; in part because I already knew many of those recordings, and for that reason was more interested in collecting other, less familiar, artists, One interesting anomaly, is DG's Bach333 megabox, released in 2018, which I recently acquired. For a Bach lover with a scholarly bent like me, it proved irresistible (though my bank account suffered "viel Bekümmernis." In any case, that huge traveling Bach library seems like something of a throwback. Though not housed in a piece of furniture (it could have been), it comes in a huge reinforced cardboard box, with three hardcover books, smaller booklets with complete notes, track listings, and--get this!!--texts and translations for all the vocal works. Not only does the box cover all of Bach's extant works, it includes multiple recorded versions of just about everything. Some of these are historical recordings, most are recent HIP performances. The whole thing is expertly and effectively curated. And of course it's a strictly limited edition, and will likely never be reissued. However, it is a quality product that doesn't cheapen the legacy of the great Cantor of Leipzig. One last observation. When, after great effort, I finally dislodged this monument from its packaging, my first thought was, "this is Bach's tomb and perhaps also the grave of classical music recording as we have known it." Thanks so much for your commentaries, Dave--and also for your invaluable pedagogy. If the classical music industry is ever resurrected, we may all have you to thank.
To see how classical music appreciation has diminshed, historically, one has only to look at how such music was treated in Hollywood. In the 1930s and 1940s, movies were filled with classical music; there seemed to be no fear of it on the part of the public. You had biopics about composers (Katharine Hepburn as Clara Schumann, anyone?), classical pieces in cartoons (Disney, Warner Bros. --- Bugs Bunny as the Barber of Seville), and films about instrumentalists (Humoresque, with John Garfield/Isaac Stern playing Zigeunerweisen...). People listened to classical music even when they were not classical music fans or nuts. Now, that is gone. The world is divided... Anyway, David, I love your RUclips videos, and appreciate them. Keep it going, and thank you.
Labels are clearly buckling under the weight of multiple versions of the same pieces. The flood of mega boxes feels like the last hurrah for an older generation of performers and that the labels will put their eggs into the ‘new’ recording market. This is why I have hoovered up as many boxes as I can. Problem is it will now take literally years to work through them. I am glad I have that problem - the Szell box alone justifies it - but very soon it’s not a problem people will be able to have. Snap them up while you can, everyone! Mr Hurwitz’s videos on various sets have cost me a pretty penny, but there is no guarantee these recordings will be accessible in physical form for much longer.
Are all of these box sets available to stream? If so, do we need the physical box sets themselves?
I think the reason for this is that these things are very cheap to produce. A few major labels still tout a handful of artists- Lang Lang on DG and Igor Levitt on Sony, for instance-but it simply can't cost much to rerelease old recordings, especially when the majors are part of massive holding companies with enormous budgets.
The plethora of boxes resembles a going out of business sale to me. It's deplorable they don't stay in print longer. You're right, though, it does take a long time to actually play them; I've had the Ormandy box for months and am now up to CD 80 of 120.
The competition for new recordings is often the old ones. OK, back in the day, Ormandy, Solti, Karajan, Haitink, and Bernstein were in competition with new releases. Before then it might have been Szell, Klemperer, and Munch. Guess what the competition is now? The dead guys as conductors! This also applies to pianists, violinists, cellists, and chamber ensembles.
Yes, LP's deteriorated, but I've got 40-year-old CD's that have lost nothing.
Dave, it is so sad. I always loved booklets and analyses. Listening and reading sometimes musicological stuff is a special joy. That's why I hate streaming services. Half of enjoyment may easily gone. It so sad and true. Everything valuable is fading away in our time.
Exactly. When I used to buy LPs in the 1980's I would pour over the notes and I remember Neville Cardus' notes in the Mahler - Haitink (Philips box). Now I buy downloads and never even look at the notes and shamefully hardly ever listen to the recordings themselves. I feel regret and somewhat shame at how the ''product'' has replaced the LP as a cultural artefact.
I agree. It's sad. They could have packaged and marketed it better without making it worthless.
Yes, I especially like the booklets in (for one example) Naxos' Historical series, where you can read about the recording session, how many and which different takes were issued when and why, on which old labels, whether the artist(s) had a hissy fit at the session, etc.
I miss that too. I remember getting posters and booklets with lyrics in CDs as a kid, but streaming services don’t bring the same joy. I know physical CDs are huge in K-pop as they come with photo books, photo cards of the idols, and extras. It’s a shame more non K-pop artists don’t do that kind of thing.
All I can tell you David is that you are helping the industry with your channel here. I am buying both music I can stream and physical boxed sets based on your videos, the Poulenc boxed set for instance and the Unknown Strauss box. This will undoubtedly continue as I explore here. What is true for me is probably true for others.
Great talk, David! Norbert Lebrecht's book "Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness" describes in detail and in very enjoyable way the "shameful" death of the classical record industry, because of tons of bad decisions at corporate level.
There is another very sad consequence of the fall and decline of that industry: that a very important channel has been lost for young artists. Let me illustrate it with one example: Julia Fischer. After some excellent recordings with Pentatone (that are still among their best selling products), where she had almost a unique position as a star violinist, she moved to Decca under the very naive illusion that Decca would allow her to record with the best orchestras, not realizing that Decca, after having fired most of their artists under contract, only wanted to make sure that no serious competition affects the few that remained under contract. After making some fine recordings, mainly solo violin, without great orchestras, she left. Hence, the only way to listen to Julia Fischer today is either in the concert hall or if you suscribe to her paid channel.
Such a great violinist. Thanks for explaining why we don't have as many recordings of her as we should. What a shame.
@@nealkurz6503 I wrote about his insight regarding corporate decisions, not about his opinions about musicians.
Recordings were a sideline for classical musicians who long relied upon the box office for live performances. With the decline of the recording industry we have orchestras starting their own labels (without the quality control of performances that the old labels insisted upon).
Unless one relies heavily upon recorded music, it is back largely to live performances.
As far as your influence, at least in my case, I now check your videos before I purchase. As an example, the 90 disc Naxos Beethoven box is arriving today. Other past purchases were made based upon your recommendation. Please do not downplay your contribution . You are providing a valuable service. Keep up the good work.
Dear Dave. Oddly enough, though I accumulated thousands through the years - I can't remember when I last put a CD into my poor player, since I switched to Streaming and MP3. The only alive-and-kicking discs I see nowadays are on your blessed channel! Keep going! Maybe you are the last man standing in the vanishing CD's universe
I am binging this channel at this point. Love the insights and the humour. 😊
Regarding the record labels: "Shouldn't they go out and try to sell this stuff to someone else, besides me!" Made by laugh out loud. David, you and the other 12 people that buy these box sets, are public benefactors: "What can we get Dave Hurwitz to buy next?" must be emblazoned across the walls of many of the major record labels across the world. On a serious note, I'd love your thoughts on the emergence of streaming: the fact that your overflow room (and all your other rooms!) can now be available to anyone, with a subscription. Not your knowledge (alas!).
Great commentary, Dave. Thanks. The bright side is that you can get classical music from second hand merchants for little or almost nothing now; stuff you'll probably never find streaming. And, hey, this trend is inevitable; I mean, how many households curently have the greatest performances of King Ramses court players in their collection? It's all gone with the wind. Cheers!
Great talk s usual. I bought the large Toscanini "Furniture" box a number of years ago. I like listening to the performances and comparing them to more "modern" conductors. Much of the sound is very listenable and Toscanini performances are very worthwhile. I added many of the earlier Toscanini with the NY Phil - recordings from Naxos - some of them are very good and listenable. .
Yesterday I was listening to the earlier Bruno Walter recordings with Vienna Phil...at the same time I bought the Toscanini box (these were recorded in the 1930s) - I was able to buy a large Walter collection ..pressing from Japan at a decent price....The CD box is only Japanese...but the CDs themselves are in English. The pressings are spectacular.
David...I like listening to these old recordings ..many of them are very good and the sound is not bad. Example Walter's 1st act of Walkure...what a great performance.
Keep up your videos...they are the best thing on RUclips. As always be well...jerel ( I have a massive CD collection..but adding stuff due to your recommendations).
I worked at BMG from 1992-95, the time in which the initial AT Edition was issued on CD, along with the piece of furniture display case. What I heard in the grapevine was that the Toscanini family (estate) was very upset that Furtwängler recordings were appearing on CD while few if any AT recordings were being issued on the new format. BMG then committed to issuing an AT Edition, BUT the bean counters insisted it be sold at midline. The AT family objected as they felt a lower price point would cheapen his legacy. Of course, BMG pointed out that AT’s legacy had already appeared on budget Victrola LPs. As a sop to the family, BMG came up with the display case idea. And - in a move equal to lighting your cigars with hundred dollar bills - they proposed to display a gold-embossed AT signature on the product. Not on the CDs mind you, but on the throw-away cardboard long-box outer wrap that housed early CDs for retail record bin display. And just to make it less cost effective, BMG contracted with the most expensive printer available to produce the throw-away boxes.
Again, this is what I heard in the hallowed hallways of BMG. I am open to being corrected by anyone who has first-hand knowledge of the situation at the time.
Yes. There were a few CD's released in the late 80s by RCA but the remasterings were poor and I think the Toscanini family objected to the fact that they were on "Gold Seal" instead of "Red Seal." So then RCA went to work on the first box.
Why does Toscanini's family have anything to say about this? The issues are cultural responsibility, AT's contract with RCA, and Public Domain laws. Similarly, I never understood why Mahler's sorta-wife could hold up performing parts of the 10th Symphony. With all due respect to family values and domestic ties, of course.
@@davidaltschuler9687 - you answered your own question: contracts. After AT’s death, the contract became one between RCA and the AT estate. They had say over certain aspects of his legacy.
You may be interested to know that Rachmaninoff’s contract with RCA specified that the English transliteration of his name end in two f’s, rather than a v or some other combination of letters. It is said that he felt this spelling better expressed how he wanted his name pronounced. That contract clause remained in full force when I was working at BMG in the mid nineties, decades after Rachmaninoff had passed away.
BTW - there is no such thing as a public domain recording in the USA. All pre-1972 recordings enjoy copyright protection in the USA until 2065.
@@jfddoc - not true. The earliest AT releases were on Red Seal. The first version of the Complete AT Edition was on Gold Seal. The outer box and the B&W CD sleeves used in the second version of the CATE are branded with the Red Seal (yes, that box I got for $75). Go figure.
@@markstenroos6732 Thanks; makes sense, Mark. BTW, I enjoy your Amazon reviews. It's a shame that they cut out comments on reviews, eliminating what was a lovely opportunity for relationships between people of similar interests. Beginning to dislike that company intensely! All the best,
I was re-watching this video and this memory came to mind.
I bought my 1st CD player in 1986, and when I went to "Peaches"
(which had a very decent classical selection)to purchase my compact disc
so I could listen to my new $135.00 CD
player that afternoon.
Without digging thru much I went straight for the classics that I grew up on(all which happened to be all Columbia Great Performances)
Bernstein - Pictures, the Planets, firebird suite.
Ormandy - Roman trilogy, organ symphony, Concerto for Orchestra.
Szell - Till/death/don, beethoven 5/6, New World, Wagner without words.
I looked pass all the new DDD recordings & picked up the classics.
I just found this video. I love it 💚
Just looking through the comments this is an intellectual community that can itself frighten the -let’a call it- the TikTok community where discussions are much briefer.
Nice video Dave. I laughed when I heard the squeaky sound of the glass door because I bought one in mid 90s. Ah those good ol’ days.
Your realism and justified bitterness about this loss of value of the object produced by the music industry, all of this is, in my opinion, central. Because you've once again raised the question of dematerialization and its implications. I'm always very dissatisfied with the way this issue is dealt with, generally by rejoicing in the digital shift of digital platforms. Because the question, as you put it, is enormous: the relationship you can have (and you illustrate this with your videos) with these cultural products is not just the relationship of a collector and a connoisseur, it's the very relationship that can be established between a human being and a cultural object in our hands. As I said, all this is central to the debate. A debate that would be fascinating to have live and not in writing, because it would take too much time and I'm not sure I'd be read. In any case, thank you for putting this essential debate into perspective for today's times and what has become of the transmission of the phonographic heritage of music.
Great presentation! I truly enjoyed the historical aspects of the recording industry you touched upon.
Very interesting talk, David. I wonder how much piracy and file sharing has to do with the devaluation of music? I see a similar phenomena in film. The big Hollywood studios have largely stopped making low to medium budget films. They are concentrating on blockbusters, for the most part. There are many theories as to why, but one of the more prevalent ones is that films are pirated as soon as they are released, sometimes even earlier. So the studios may as well make as much money as possible right up front, to make it worth their while. Some of the big studios are still releasing their old catalog titles on BD, but most of them are licensing them out to smaller boutique labels that specialize in making product for media collectors, which is a niche market. MGM is a good example of that. There is just not enough money in old films, just like there probably isn't in old classical recordings.
Very good points, all.
Classical music is (at the same tie) trying to promote new artists covering mostly the same compositions while the older recordings still are masterpieces. In other genres you might get re-mastered versions of a classic rock album or a greatest hits or one made from unreleased tracks ... Classical music in a broad sense is a mess, layer upon layer or multiple versions of the same, trying to compete with other genres (when writing a new composition is not at all comparable to pop music production for ex.) .... eventually the industry will collapse, paying artists less and less and relying more and more on sponsors/gimmicks ... because people will become less interested. They already are, and they seems less interested in owning and more in streaming...
Why complain, when one can kvetch! 😁
To my great surprise, I read - in Heyworth's very detailled Klemperer-biography, I think it was - that Furtwängler and Klemperer had been to the same Toscanini concert, and when they some time afterwards met, they both raved about Toscanini's interpretations and especially about the tone and sonority, that he conjured!
With the incredible advance in sound technology as demonstrated by f.ex. the SONY Szell and Walter boxes, we sorely need a new complete Toscanini box prepared along the same lines, with equal love and care, and with the same exquisite presentation!
This is a loaded topic. I am so frustrated that classical music won't rejuvenate itself before I die. I miss perusing classical titles at Tower and Borders and was beside myself when they went out of business. So, like everyone else, I get all my music from Amazon and ebay. WIthout them we would be in the dark ages. Is the situation the same in London and Europe? Do I have to travel to get my classical fix? I think Europeans still enjoy classical music and attend concerts and buy records. In the 60s and 70s when I was growing up the nuns and teachers played classical music in class and gave us rudimentary exposure to classical music. These days I don't think they teach music or the arts in schools. I feel like I live on a deserted island with no one around to talk to about my classical fix and I mean in person with the actual product to touch and feel, not on the internet. The sitaution is sad and depressing. Any positive words for me?
Sure. Classical music will do fine. Just differently.
A very love having this compact toscanini box set. Such a treat to have such an embarrassment of riches. Toscanini a great conductor who stood for the right rigngs and a legacy undiminished with time. Perhaps the conductor i have read thr most about. Remarkablr figure.
As you say: There is no way to put that genie back in the bottle. The classical music industry has for the past thirty years basically been a mere specialist branch of the packaging industry. And as digital information doesn't need any packaging, there is no value to be extracted from what was once a product. And with younger people, the whole concept of "physically owning" a piece of information, such as a recording, just doesn't resonate anymore. For those of us who grew up with CDs or even vinyl, there is a sentimental attachment involved. Not for somebody who grew up with an iPod. I feel the shift myself: I'm paying 10 euros a month for my Spotify subscription and am a happier listener than I have ever been when I was still collecting stuff. If I could make any money by selling the better part of my several-K CD collection, I'd happily do so. But as you point out: Who'd pay anything for such relics from the dustheap of history?
I am of the "younger people" but I identify with the urge to "physically own" something. There's something intrinsically unappealing to me about just having an MP3 file on my desktop*: there is nothing there, no history, no memories except that of finding the file, nothing to touch or hold; contrariwise, I find it inherently appealing to be able to hold a CD (or an LP), to turn it over, to read the text on the case, the sleeve, or the booklet, to (in some cases) blow a bit of dust off of it, and slide it onto or click it into my player. The magic is in the ceremony of it all. I'm the same way with books; my library is far too large for the space I have...
*Oftentimes, especially when dealing with seldom-recorded operas (e.g., Hasse's Leucippo) I am forced to go digital.
As I listened/watched, I was reminded of an excellent book by Joseph Horowitz: "Understanding Toscanini" which, after a fairly dense opening chapter, opens up into a fascinating, in-depth chronicle of RCA's MARKETING of Toscanini as a CULTURAL ICON, mainly through David Sarnoff's creation of the NBC Symphony and the RCA catalog of recordings. It's a real eye-opener, filled with little-known info..and very germane to the topic of this particular "Music Chat". (You'll even see a reproduction of an RCA 1977 Toscanini portrait "suitable for framing"; just "cut along the dotted line!" ) LR
Yes, I have read it.
Hello, I think there's a difference between commercial value and the a value as a recording and/or personal assesment value. I agree, commecial value is zero but for many collectors and enthusiasts, it is much more than it's commecial value! Great you mentioned it!
I used to buy and sell classical music during the boom during the 90s and only Naxos had the formula correct. Work on volume and offer a greater variety. The majors at the time were overpricing recordings that had made their money and were even public domain.
Most classical music is public domain. Only the labels and those involved were making any money. Nevertheless, they were still pumping out Toscanini recordings at a premium price. Why?! I also was a guitar tech for rock bands and that would have been seen as totally counter intuitive within that genre.
Even after the tech to produce CDs became cheaper, classical CDs went UP in some cases. Naxos bucked the trend and made a killing.
I sold tons of Naxos. At one point, I sold 10 Naxos for every one CD from a major.
His point about snobbery and arrogance is spot--- on!!! Having no clue how the industry worked also contributed.
Very interesting. I still watch these videos, even though I haven't purchased a CD in 15 years, and there are no stores in which to browse for hours. But it informs my RUclips searches. Even when I don't agree, I know,deep down, that Hurwitz is RIGHT!
Try thrift stores. You'd be surprised the stacks of vinyls and CDs that you can still sift through for $1.
I like to check Amazon prices on these sold out boxes every now and then... The Toscanini carton box is now at almost 500 USD, used. That's nothing when compared to the revered Monteux box that was available for a short time several years ago... That one is in the 4 digit realm by now. No idea if people pay those prices, but that's just crazy for an essentially budget release. Do they create this scarcity on purpose? However, I must say I'm drooling over that beautiful piece of furniture, Dave. Imagine what kind of wall-filler it would make if they made that for the Naïve Vivaldi edition... Very interesting video, by the way.
Supply and demand.
I purchased the Toscanini “Box” from amazon in June 2012 for all of $75. Brand new and factory sealed. My copy arrived undamaged.
Maybe there’s something in the air, because I took The Box down off the shelf yesterday and looked through every CD to identify those that I am pretty sure have never gotten a listen in the past nine years. I’ll be having a mini Toscanini festival over the next few days that will NOT include the usual Beethoven, Brahms and Verdi…at least until the NEXT super-budget mega set shows up in the form of DG’s Karl Böhm Complete Orchestral Recordings, which will no doubt provide a distraction from my best-laid Toscanini plans.
On edit: BTW - The Box included a 172-page booklet, 42 pages of which were taken up by articles in English by Harvey Sachs and Mortimer Frank (the other 130 pages are translations of the articles into other languages), so the liner notes weren’t totally jettisoned. And, one can always purchase the Sachs books on Toscanini as a supplement to the CD set.
@Mark Stenroos When my teenage nieces and nephews visit, they gawk at my collection of 100s of lp records and compact dics as if viewing dinosaurs in a museum.
o how right you are! Thank you and greetings from France
My parents had a subscription to a classical music "album of the month" mail service for lp's when i was growing up in the 1980's. i dont know if it was columbia house or something else. I grew up with a Karajan "Great Symphonies" DG set. Of course i didnt know who the heck Karajan was growing up, only that he was the guy wit the white hair who was so caught up in conducting with his eyes closed on the outside picture of the box. What I did know was that those old lp's opened up my mind as a kid to wonderful musical worlds that i may have never found otherwise. I would come home from school and i would put on the record on the turntable and listen to stuff that i thought was mindlbowing. I lost track of how many times I listened to Beethoven's Eroica not even truly understanding who Beethoven was or Tchaikovsky's Pathetique!! Another all time favorite was Beecham's The Planets DG album--it was music that captivated me right from the very word go!! A cover that invited me to explore was Barenboim's The Sorcerer's Apprentice DG lp with a mysterious illustration of a young wizard sititing down and reading a spellbook by mooonlight. i was like "what the heck is this?" and then i put on the music and i was like --"whoa!!" Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhbition DG Karajan lp and Beecham's EMI Scheherazade lp were two others albums that must have very nearly worn out the needle on my family''s record player.
Anyway, i guess what I'm trying to say was that Im grateful that my parents had that subscription service when i was a kid and Im grateful that the record industry tried to popularize classical music by offering such a service to the public. I would've never explored classical music had i not been exposed to it at home, since the 80's was the age of radio and great popular acts like Michael Jackson and Madonna were what was on the airwaves. I remember as a young man starting college and exploring NYC on my own how my mind was blown the first time i went to the Tower Records that was near to the college and discovered that they had a classical section. So many cd's and even an lp section!!! Anyway those times are well and gone. These days unless a parent deliberately has some classical tracks on their home computer listening list, most kids will never be exposed to it since in the highly personalized world of downloading tracks it is too easy to get lost only in what you already know. A service such as spotify will only recommend more of what you have already listened to. I wonder if in the age of digital if classical will ever achieve the heights it had during the cd era. It's such a shame you don't get liner notes with a digital release. So much of classical depends on being educated on the music, composer, and conductor or the performer.
I don't believe Beecham performed, or recorded, Holst's The Planets. Methinks the album which is your favorite was with William Steinberg conducting the Boston Symphony, with a very memorable cover and a very fine rendition. It was released by DGG in 1971. If your first hearing of The Planets was earlier than that, then it was probably Adrian Boult/New Philharmonia on Angel circa 1967 or even Karajan/Vienna Philharmonic on London circa 1959/60.
@@peacearchwa5103 Yes you are quite correct and I apologize for the error. It is especially frightful since i try to be careful wit these type of things, but occasionally the mind will slip. Thank you for having been courteous and magnanimous when pointing out my mistake as you could have easily torn me apart and with good reason-I may have been unintentionally sending people out to look for a non existing album!! The recording of The Planets i grew up listening to was the Karajan with the huge orange picture of Saturn on the cover (Voyager 1 and 2!!) on lp. For me that album defined The Planets growing up and in my mind it is still acts as a reference. It was so beautiful to listen to. At some point my parents got rid of all their lp's and it wasn't until i was an adult that i was able to get the same recording but on cd! Later i went on to collect other recordings of the work and I discovered the Steinberg recording on cd that you mentioned and it is definitely one of my faves!! 😄💿
I do appreciate a good presentation including a booklet/notes which I ALWAYS read! There is less of that. Also fewer operas including librettos. Sometimes they include a CD with the libretto, but I don't have a computer. I remember buying the Decca Sutherland/Bellini box which was very frugally packaged. No librettos and I was shocked that there wasn't even a picture of the Diva! Recently got some Astrid Varnay Wagner operas and was OK with no libretto....it's probably a matter of familiarity. I really try to steer away from buy operas without librettos if I'm less familiar with them.
Great talk, again! The labels package & repackage; one year something is remastered & delux packaged, the next it's in a discount series. It seems always to have been thus. I started serious listening & collecting at age 13 in 1972. Back then, Reiner, Szell, Ormondy, Markevitch, Silverstri & many others in that distinguished pantheon were licensed to cheap supermarket lines. I remain grateful! They were within reach of my schoolboy budget. The industry also carefully rationed its products; 2 or 3 Beethoven cycles by label, for example, if that. When CDs were introduced, many great performances by star conductors of the recent past or soloists no longer active were on cheap labels & EMI, to take one example, charged full price for the endless stream of Rattle & CBSO releases! Again, eternal gratitude for the decision, but when all the labels released their vast back catalogues onto CD (swathes of which were hitherto only available as rare & expensive collector's items) I wondered who on earth would buy new releases? Given the drooling choice, who in the 80s or 90s was really going to prefer Haitink, Rattle, Abbado et al? There's a devaluing of the product & a program of releasing tantalising older product that renders most current production almost futile. I cannot remember when I last purchased a new CD. But then I vastly prefer live concerts & hope I am a better informed & more enthusiastic listener because of the comparative base afforded by an embarrassingly large archive of recordings collected over my whole life! And the collecting is a work in progress.
I use Apple music (not promoting, you could do the same with spotify) , it's really the best thing in the world...i have access to basically every work/recording you've talked about in this channel and with amazing lossless quality (or even higher if you care/can tell the difference)...it really is a dream and hard to believe ...maybe too good to be sustainable for the industry...but ill ride this wave as long as I can
@@warrenj3204 Brahms: yes. Mahler: yes. Delius: yes. Beethoven - maybe? There’s a couple of recordings of the Nash playing the Septet, but on Erato.
It has almost everything I want to listen to, including quite specialist things. It won’t have particular versions of historical recordings (Marston etc) and some very recent prestige recordings won’t have all the tracks licensed (eg Trifonov Bach Art of Fugue, Kolesnikov Goldbergs, Harnoncourt Haydn Paris Symphonies :(. But usually you can buy those off iTunes.
@@warrenj3204 For the record Hyperion is not on any streaming service though I believe they do sell digital recordings on Apple Music. They're one of the few holdouts (ECM, which had a lot of contemporary recordings, capitulated a few years ago). When I talk with younger listeners Hyperion records are among the most pirated- they don't want to mail-order physical CDs which may or may not be in print.
@@warrenj3204 If a label cooperates with a streaming service at all, it usually means they'll dump their entire catalogue. So if you can find one Decca recording on Spotify (or Apple or whatever, I'm not trying to sell you anything), you'll find every Decca recording there. A few specialty labels refuse to participate in that race to the bottom, Hyperion probably being the most important one. For basically everything else, I'd just say: Get a subscription and if indeed it happens that you don't find a specific recording that you are looking for, you can still get the CD. But for just browsing repertoire and comparing versions, streaming platforms are heaven. They have entirely changed my music consumption.
I would argue that the actually dead primephonic, and idagio, are way better platforms, i just use apple music because i still have 7 months for free, after that i will only continue if they make a good platform for classical music, as they promised. If doesn't, they do simply killed primephonic for nothing.
It's horrible use streaming services like apple music and spotify, mostly because their search engines are pure trash. I can take 5 to 10 minutes just to find a single recording.
Just heard about the passing of Bernard Haitink. RIP.
Hello, great video!
Today is the first time I've seen you and your videos, and by coincidence I picked up a rock CD today from a Billboard Top 10 artist, and they wanted you to scan a QR code to go online for the liner notes/details. Two measly pieces of paper have been cut from the budgets and now I can't tell who recorded/mixed/mastered the album without going online. It's bonkers in my opinion.
Also, if you have the time, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on my "Il Mondo al Rovescio" by Gli Incogniti review video.
Cheers,
Alex
I for one am glad that this is happening now. I got the Szell box for less than $150, and the Markevitch Philips for $94.
With many years in record retail, and many more before and after that of collecting classical recordings, I think the industry at one point did figure it out, at least for a while. When major labels started reissuing older recordings on their budget lines, like Seraphim, Odyssey, etc., I think it worked to introduce mainly younger people to great music in an affordable way. Nonesuch issued some fine European recordings on a their very inexpensive label.What distinguished all of these reissues is that they took the music seriously. They were cheap to buy, but they looked like something worth investigating. Many had worthwhile liner notes, texts for vocal music, etc. Once hooked on the music, we moved on to full price recordings. I was very cynical about the crossover craze that started sometime in the 60s (I think). Some of those records sold really well, but I question whether they succeeded in getting people interested enough to explore the rest of a composer's work (if that was even their intention). Your're right, the endless re-packaging of recordings cheapens their apparent (apparent!) value. I also think the advent of the CD opened up a vast treasure trove to collectors and neophytes. I think at that time Classical went up to 5% of the market, but was it all too overwhelming for many of us? Was the market saturated with 119 recordings of a Beethoven symphony? You hit the nail on the head when you say, "let's face it. Classical is elitist" Yes, as you point out, much of it requires close attention, concentration and a learned ability to follow a piece that's longer than a pop song. It's never going to be for everyone. And that's ok. We are LUCKY, we're so fortunate to have discovered this world of incredible music, to get to know it so well and have it as a major part of our lives for as long as we're capable of hearing it.
Agreed. Not all media is destined to be consumed by the masses. What percent of the population has ever read War and Peace? Well, the similarities to classical are striking. The book is exceedingly long. The book is written in challenging language. The book requires an understanding of historical background. The book is intricate and requires attention to detail.
The industry may well have shot itself in the foot, but up and coming listeners like me were very grateful for the large amount of quality recordings we were able to buy for not a lot of money (though it still seems a lot if you're poor)... Perhaps the worst result of the bargain box approach was that it undermined new releases. Why would I follow a symphony cycle disc by individual disc, or collect the hundreds of "new faces" recordings containing the same well-worn repertoire, when I could buy an historical box for less than the price of a new single release? From this perspective, the future of the industry must lie in unfamiliar repertoire. And given the inevitable mediocrity of most new music (inevitable purely from a statistical standpoint), this means a focus on reviving forgotten and overlooked composers of previous centuries.
By the way, thanks to your mention of Joseph Martin Kraus in a previous video, I have been doing my part to support the industry by starting to assemble a little Kraus collection.
Yeah, i do understand that difficult about prices. For me is mostly because i live in a developing country where most of the recordings came from the U.S or Europe. We have a huge disparity of value between currencies, almost 6:1, here you are lucky if you get a good cycle of Mahler for 1/4 of a salary, if not half of the salary.
Not sure that RCA et al had much choice. All this material was entering Public Domain, and CDs allowed easy, high quality copying. Better to make some money than no money on your assets of diminishing value. And classical music has been sidelined in the West, with a shrinking % of the population introduced to it; the slack being taken up on Asia. (Gotta love those Bernstein concets with teens running to their seats dressed in suits.) I miss reading high quality essays, but many of those discount Editions and Cubes (especially by owenrs of RCA & Columbia) are beautifully done and respectful of the recorded legacy. Frankly, I love having a remastered complete collection with old art work for a low price/CD. There are cultural losses, as you described here, but wonderful gains for the consumer as well. We are having a lot of unexpected fun and opportunity while losing this war.
That's for sure!
Why should the Szell box ever go out of print?
Manufacturing LPs was a labor intensive process and required constant monitoring and quality control. Compared to this, the cost of producing CDs is infinitesimal.
Even the cardboard boxes, inner sleeves and booklets cost a lot less.
It's all done by computers.
How hard/expensive can it be to order up a new batch of Szell boxes?
That's not the only measure of profitability. You have to factor in the cost of keeping inventory and the rate of turnover compared to other, more marketable products by the same company. If a set like that could be produced on demand, it would be a different matter, but it can't be, and it probably makes no sense for the label to sit on any quantity when everything in the industry is trending towards reducing the footprint of physical plant and facilities.
I agree. So let’s all hope these mega box sets eventually come back to us in downloadable format. No carbon footprint. No paper. No printing. And we all get to hear what we want to here.
I would rather buy a single disc with really cool graphics, great liner notes and awesome sound than box sets. I remember growing up looking through bins of albums at the local record store. In fact the first LP I bought as a teenager, was Andre Previn with The LSO doing the Berlioz Overtures. The cover (with the famous pic of Berlioz conducting a bombastic orchestra) said buy me, there's something special about this release. Those days are gone. And I think it's sad that music that is seen as elitist, has been so cheapened as David points out. But this music should never seen as just for the very few. It should speak to everyone and be marketed to everyone.
If one is to do what makes classical music commercially viable one must have a certain modicum of learning. By definition, even for an Italian, a huge chunk of opera is in some exotic language. Then of course many masterworks have no catchy titles, so semi-literate people can rarely know about this music (which itself is good reason for making formal education more rigorous) This is not a knock on country music which has little crossover appeal to classical fans, but it is far easier to market Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, or Johnny Cash to semi-literate people than it is to market Mozart's glorious string quintets to semi-literate people. Classical music sold well in college towns when it was available, but not so well in places at the low end of social demographics.
The record labels selling classical music had to educate people about the music. As an example, Carl Nielsen left obscurity and entered the repertoire about thirty years, and record labels needed to pump him to sell his music. That is possible only when labels put out the effort.
Unless one transmutes classical music into vulgar crossovers or barbarous adaptations (Rheingold, the dry beer, is my beer! to a good but otherwise-obscure waltz) one cannot cheapen it. It is possible to do classical music badly, which is far worse than trying to expand an audience by mentioning that Schubert or Tchaikovsky wee homosexuals (that J S Bach and Bartok were straight should in no way trouble LGBT people.
The heyday of the marketing of classical music to mass audiences was quite possibly the late 1970's, when record labels used much the same marketing techniques that they were using to sell rock albums, even to the extent of conflating George Solti to Jimi Hendrix in cover art. I have no problem with that. Classical album sales declined as college education became fiendishly expensive and college graduates often became indentured servants with huge debts to pay off, often by working two cr@ppy jobs just to avoid becoming homeless and hungry. People so living -- if one can call that "living" -- lack the time to dedicate to listening to extended classical works on recordings, let alone buying them. That is more economics than music. By the way -- the last forty years have been a miserable time in which to be a young adult due to low pay, high rents, bloated costs of education, and low glass ceilings in the bureaucracies that hire debt-laden college grads.
That dsc isavailable on a box set containing the entire Previn segment of the old Angel/EMI (now on Warner). I have suggested that one could have a very strong collection by having this and George Szell's similar-sized CBS (now Sony) collection. The two were very different conductors and better fit different repertory, so there is little overlap...and few duds that you would need to supplement. There would be gaps to fill, but those would be obvious.
Previn's box has reproductions of the classy covers.
Great, David!
And what about music streaming? Deezer, Spotify, Apple Music...
We get the tracks and absolutely nothing else!
Streaming services hate their listeners and just want their money, period. Spotify is impossible to use without premium considering the constant ads and limit to the amount of songs you can look at lyrics for.
Brilliant. Sad and pathetic situation as you say but you had me laughing repeatedly. There was also the "Immortal Toscanini," the series of touted remasterings, re-equalized with some added sonic ambience, some very good and some crappy and careless. That series was never even finished, I believe, and amounted to a dozen releases. But not one properly curated and annotated release of NEW material. Nothing like the beautiful c. 1961 LP first release of the Philadelphia Schubert 9th in a Soria series box and booklet with fine illustrations and everything you'd want to know about the recording, Schubert and the work itself.
P.S. I never got, could never lay my hands on, the furniture even though I'd bought the Gold Seal CDs as they came out. Today I received the Warner 55 CD Furtwangler cube (not even a proper box) and not overwhelmed by the packaging. With the Ormandy mono box you do get a great book and original jackets, front and back (notes often surprisingly readable!) and that took somebody caring.
Despite the fact the Classical Music Industry is self destroying in the end for me it comes down to personal pleasure. Desert island listening beats corporate purgatory any day !
A couple of things. At least the stuff I have been getting from Amazon for the last year or so has been for the most part properly packaged and arrived without damage. Indeed the damage I have experience has been the result of not paying attention when using a knife to open the surrounding package. Jewel cases on the other hand almost always come damaged.
To David’s point, I think the most serious damage to the classical music industry was caused by the introduction of digital sound. 90 years ago Columbia Records introduced the laminated 78 disc proclaiming reproduction “without the scratch.” In my opinion, only recently have rather expensive units been able to reproduce “Red Book” CDs without the SCREECH.
Perhaps these comments were slightly off topic but gee this is fun!
Quick tangential question for you Dave: you highlighted the Sachs book; have you considered periodically doing classical music book recommendations on the RUclips channel? Thanks for another compelling video!
Yes, I have thought about it.
ooh, I've been waiting for this talk for a while!
Historical note - the first Columbia long playing records issued in 1948-50 were sold for 4.85 dollars each, which alters the price comparison considerably. These early discs would cost more like 50 dollars in today's money; still a saving on the equivalent 78 set, but not down to the level of the almost-given-away aspect depicted here. The English RUclips site 'Techmoan' has a very well written episode - 'Battle Of The Speeds' - which explains all this.
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We need one of the streaming services to take notice and offer classical/jazz. I agree that the Amazon Music library is pretty incomplete.
Qobuz does
When it comes to books I have often a choice between the same classic in paperback or in a limited edition beautifully illustrated and printed on high quality stock bound superbly and priced accordingly. The content is the same but I know which edition values that content most. I know which I will cherish. With recordings I do not have that choice. Even your cabinet of Toscanini was just the same basic CDs in a better setting. In the days of 78's you had a choice of the full symphony often bound as an album or the separate discs in cardboard covers. With LPs some companies tried hard to give their product value such as RCA with their Soria series (Beecham's Messiah with tipped in illustrations printed in Switzerland - and that was the cheaper alternative to the even more luxurious limited edition). Remember the Archive boxes from DG with cloth bound boxes, beautifully printed notes the size of the box and even a card for your files with recording notes? I still have mine because they are individually things of beauty and vale both in themselves and in what the recordings hold. (Glad you still favour as a reference the Richter B Minor Mass but the original box of LPs totally outclasses its present wretched presentation). The problem began with CDs as nobody seems able to produce editions eschewing the nasty plastic fall to pieces cases. Hopefully there are companies in the Classical world who will take a leaf out of the Pop world and issue truly special limited editions although I do note that to do so some of those have reverted to vinyl!
A simplification of one side of the story:
Back in the day record companies were owned by music lovers. Or at least those who liked music! In fact, once rock n roll started to sell in large numbers and classical sales ebbed (and to some extent, jazz, too), that the record companies used the money from huge sales of rock to in a way subsidize the classical music industry. It was “the right thing to do”. They felt that as record company owners it was keeping the music they loved in print and available.But record popular (rock, etc.) sales became TOO big, and so the corporations thought, as they usually do, “if we can’t beat our competition, we’ll buy them”. And so they did. Now record companies were controlled by their boards, who didn’t care about music, they cared about profits. And that’s where the story of the classical music industry’s downfall got even worse - not to mention that classical (and their audience) was stuck in the dead European white man composer zone. Plus not to mention that Apple invented iTunes before the record them, as the record corporations were fighting a losing battle with digital downloads. Their fingers in the digital dike was a bad idea. Now rock music has Bandcamp, live shows, and merch. The record companies have Adele and country music. And classical music doesn’t have shit.
And us EDM fans have sound cloud and 15 second poor quality snippets from DJ sets.
I Have the 2012 complete box. but I would have liked to have the cabinet version :)
I recall that, when the complete Toscanini recordings were first issued on CD, Wanda Toscanini was enraged that they were sold as budget rather than full-priced CD's. Earlier, there was the Franklin Mint Toscanini edition, with luxurious, thick red-vinyl LP's and booklet autographed by Wanda.
I have memories of the first complete Rubinstein edition in the 90s (?) that came in some kind of suitcase and was really expensive. When the next version came out in the big red box it was more affordable but not available in any local shops. Amazon and the French post office did everything to ensure it was impossible to get a non-dinged box...
James. I have the suitcase!! It cost me over $1k. I kid you not. The new complete Rubenstein is available for $100.
I agree with a lot of what you said here, David, but I think you're overlooking some of the facets of steaming services. You don't get physical product but you DO get a lot of important features. Just being able to pick almost anything ON DEMAND is incredibly valuable as is eliminating the need to store and sort the physical product. If I have the choice between streaming a recording or looking for it in my collection, digging it out and putting it in a device to play, I invariably choose streaming. Now the streaming services could do so much more to increase the value of the recordings. For example, there is no reason they couldn't include those amazing liner notes on-line that you often get with physical product. They can also include detailed information about the recording that is essential for historical recordings.
I don't know why everyone assumes I have a negative view of streaming services. I don't. I don't use them, but that's only because I have so much physical product sitting around. I think they are wonderful for anyone who doesn't have lots of space and money, etc. I am merely describing what has happened to to the industry, and I'm not pessimistic about it at all. It will survive in some form or other and to be honest I don't especially care which, as long as the music remains available to those who want it.
As I'm a Marxist from way back, I remember reading where Groucho said, "For $1.50 I can get you a recording of 'Minnie The Moocher ' and for another 2 bucks I can get you Minnie".
Thank you for a good, thought provoking video. Surely one of the problems is that for Warners, Universal etc, classical music is tiny part of their turnover, so there is no incentive to do anything more than make a quick buck? I enjoyed the podcast with Rob Cowan on Furtwängler. By the way, happy 100th birthday Malcolm Arnold.
So true....great, great statement!
I would like to add that there are now online releases where you cannot even figure out what recording it is that they are selling. For example Sony has some online Richter releases. But no date and no place, so you don't even know what recording it is of the many he made of each piece. How can someone that cares enough to know Richter buy that?
I love this guy! I am a big fan!
David on the cheapo product, around 17:30: “the only thing they could give you less than this… is a digit!” I momentarily heard this as digit = finger, like the record companies are flipping you the bird 😂😂😂
That too!
Never mind the Toscanini "shelf", I'm waiting for the Tinnitus Classics "commode" edition.
And bedpan or chamber pot editions for the budget market.
Hi Mr. Hurwitz. First of all excuse me for my bad English. I think a big problem for these kind of sound recordings is simply that the copyright expired. And, since there are NO master tapes to guarantee a better quality transfer and remastering, anyone with a good source (I mean a well preserved 78 rpm disc) has the right to publish the recording, previously "polishing" the sound by means of some kind of software. So RCA has to face the various Naxos, Orfeo, etc. who publish the exact SAME recordings, sometimes in "superior" sound. Just my humble opinion, of course.
Luckily there is David who can supply us with backgrounds and notes to fill the gaps 😅😅
There is a key point in the killing of Classical music. It was when Clive Davis gave a presentation to the powers that be at Columbia emphatically stating that Classical music did not provide even a smidgeon of ROI. Columbia, subsequently followed by RCA, London/EMI, Capitol, stopped studio recordings among other budgetary cuts. For a long time after that, we were subjected to live recordings complete with coughs, comparatively poorer sound with odd balances. The moto was cut, cut, cut expenses. Not only that, but behind the scenes, technical development stalled.
In the 1950s, RCA developed 3-channel recording so the engineers could get a better mix for mono and eventually stereo. London/Decca immedially followed with the microphone "tree" comparable to RCA's "mic ring". RCA was designing and manuacturing their own microphones, mixers, tape decks, speakers etc. I remember one of the last boards in 1975, it had 40 channel mic inputs, 16 channels for live mix down to 8 channels which was sent to two RCA 2" tape decks. All of that technical development stopped.
Marketing to the elite happened a few years after stereo LPs. Remember the 99 cent supermarket stereo discs, many of which were classical music? After the thrill of stereo wore off, that was when Clive stepped and killed the classical recording industry.
Call me a heretic, but I buy CDs *only* for the music they contain, not for who's performing it or what the packaging looks like. The performer is only relevant (to me) in distinguishing between recordings (so, I can listen to Klemperer's King Stephan or Bernstein's, for example).
I go further: any CD I buy gets immediately ripped to hard disk and split into individual compositions. So the fact that the record company combined Beethoven's 5th and 6th onto one physical disk is irrelevant to me: I end up with two compositions in two separate folders on the hard disk.
That said, I see the point you're making and I certainly see that it makes sense, for people who are physical-medium-centred. But for me, I'd rather my music came as pure music, not as pieces of furniture! And for notes, texts, schorlarly insight... well, there's the rest of the Internet and the purchasing of scholarly books.
I also happen to think cheap 'complete' box sets are an excellent way to entice new listeners into 'the gang' of classical music afficionados! So, if they've turned it into a 'worthless' commodity (i.e., a really cheap one) that seems like a good thing to me!
“The shelf” still looms unsurpassed…
Once more your thoughts are very sobering. It does seem to be a case of diminishing returns and that happens with pop and rock and jazz as well. Recent CD reissues of old Bob Dylan albums do not have much in the way of information while previous reissues do so much more as - for example - who is on the record, and some informational detail - so usually with classical pop or jazz, I try to buy older editions knowing that I have something to read as well as listen. I have the Karajan complete Beethoven which is full of fascinating analysis and the cheap Brilliant Classics set with Blomstedt. The latter set is just the discs in cardboard sleeves and nothing else which may be forboding to a newcomer to the music. Mind you I did find the Karajan in a thrift store for less than a tenner. Hopefully, the independents like Naxos, Nimbus, Hyperion, etc will learn from the mistakes of the majors.
This is what I have been saying, there is umpteen to the uptempo power of the same pieces or records of the same pieces
I did purchase the essential recordings as sadly that's what's available. Still quite good despite the limitations. Sadly this is the state of things
Death by cd ! I have most of the cds I would like to have. I am your age. The youngsters will get downloads. It is mostly on RUclips but I like to buy cds of my favourite 20th century mostly German/Austrian type music before it sells out, some of it on CPO or Capriccio, be it Wetz, Pepping, Schoenberg, Korngold, Pfitzner, Zemlinsky, Weill, Eisler, Schoeck, Schulhof, Pavel Haas, Ullman.. It all has musical value.
For years Ring cycles were very expensive.
So interesting, thanks again David. You are a national treasure, or as Austrians say a „Wunderwuzzi“ (wizz kid). By the way, do you think you could find time to make a little talk about the former Minnesota orchestra and NYPO conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos? In 1997 a Greek newspaper in collaboration with the label Discantus issued a 50xCD set, stretched from the very early Minnesota years till the later NY MET ones. Some gems were Brahms 1. piano concerto with William Kapell, major violin concertos with Francescatti, Milstein and Elman and magnificent opera performances,l: Walküre with Harshaw as Brünnhilde, Ballo with Peerce, Milanov and Marian Anderson. I never liked his Beethoven, as I find it too romantic and “Mahler colored” for my ears. I prefer the classical straight way of Szell, Böhm or even better Schmidt-Isserstedt and Klecki. Have a great week!
There is a big Mitropoulos box coming from Sony next year, so we can all weigh in!
@@DavesClassicalGuide Yes, yes, yes! Our prayers being answered at last! That piece of news made my day! 🤩
There are surely good sides to this, I don't have that much money to spend on recordings, and I have been able to buy boxes of the complete works of Haydn, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc., for less than (and sometimes quite a bit less than) £100, sometthing that would never have been remotely possible in the period of vinyl LPs.
I guess I'm part of the problem. I used to buy CD's but now for $20 a month me and my whole family get unlimited Apple Music. Apple does great job and has almost everything recommended here. Now I listed to 100% classical but I doubt the artists are making much from me. As I understand it Classical Music listeners account for only 1% of the streaming music customers. What I find odd is that Apple bought a premium classical music streaming service Primephonic. I presume this is because the Apple user interface is so terrible for classical music. Maybe, hopefully, they use the Primephonic acquisition to offer a premium experience for that 1%. I would certainly pay a premium price for such a thing.
I had no idea that furniture thing existed.
I assume there will be another super premium Toscanini box someday with another pass at the mastering but maybe these are as good as we can expect.
So here's a question: What's the largest classical box set ever released?
(largest in number of discs, not largest piece of furniture)
Probably the Karajan complete DG edition...
I think the advent of music streaming sites, which require a monthly subscription only, has also played a part in devaluing Classical Music. These days people can easily pick and choose what they want to listen to, and millennials in particular want to hear something instantaneous and unchallenging. Whatever way you look at it, listening to music via a streaming service is not quite the same as physically owning the CD. Another reason why classical music is not as popular is simply because of the way in which it was recorded. Most folks these days prefer to listen to music through their headphones. They prefer music that was recorded in a studio rather than for live performance (as they want to hear crystal sharp instruments in both ears), whereas Classical Music tends to stick to the acoustic format mostly favoured by theatrical (live) audiences. This is especially true of classical music that was recorded many years ago. I personally have no problem listening to the old recordings, but I think you'll find most modern listeners do.
Record company corporate mergers have changed the equation for issuing classical music. I don't know what the global percentage of physical album sales is for classical product, but it's likely smaller than in the 1980s and primarily focused in China, Japan and other areas of Asia where Western classical music has developed a certain following. Speaking of squeezing money out of ancient intellectual property, did you know that shortly after Sony acquired BMG/RCA, Sony proceeded to sell the "Victrola" brand name to Innovative Technologies, which sells a variety of low-cost record players marketed under the name of -- you guessed it -- "Victrola"!
Nowadays I can go to a used music store and buy used classical CDs in mint condition for anywhere from 50 cents to five dollars per disc. I often walk out with 20 discs for $10. If I am patient and can wait for a month or two, the price on the $5 discs will come down to $2, and eventually to 50 cents. I never buy used discs unless they are in mint condition.
Some of these huge box sets seem more like a threat than an enticement. 😎🎹
Mr. Hurwitz, you are often critical of historical recordings with antique sound quality not being optimal performances of essential works. Where does Toscanini place on your scale of historical merit vs. recording merit?
I think they sound fine. My standard is simple and has objective and subject components. Objectively, does the recording capture the music with reasonable accuracy and fidelity based on what I see in a score, and subjectively, can I hear what I know (or believe) I ought to hear based on my knowledge of the piece? Whether a disc is "historical" or not doesn't really matter. What matters is the standard. That's why older recordings of chamber, solo keyboard, or vocal music are often more tolerable than those of orchestral music. I think a very large number of Toscanini recordings are just fine.
Hello David! I like to think of the hole picture. From before beethoven when only people from aristocracy could listen to music, until now. Passing through the xx century where at some point people with money could listen to music buying an LP or CD.
The cd and L.p. made a hole industry generate millions, but it's mabe just a step of the hole process of democratization of the access to music.
Nowadays, you don't even need the money to bye the Cd. You can just pay 9 dollars to Spotify and listen to it all! It's fantastic!!
The problem is that there is no money In the industry so people can not compose... play... direct as a professional . And the artistic level can go down the road!!
Anyway... Mozart also gave a lot of lessons and composed afterwards. So it's possible to have a paying bills job and dedicate soulfully to the art in your other moments...
To finish with a statistic. Spotify gives you the monthly listeners. Bernstein: 1.23 million; Toscanini: 11000; Justin bieber 85 million
Greetings!!!
Dont forget while they issued the cheap boxes, they came out with some thirteen duos of "remastered" Toscanini recordings. And, the beethoven symphonies made up the first three in that series.
As someone who grew up listening to Toscanini on LP (budget), and who bought the whole edition peace meal, there is yet another way I would like to see the series offered: in TERMS OF THE SOUND..... There are many Toscanini recordings that had quite good mono sound, and many that had quite poor sound. What is the point of offering new listeners to classical music or toscanini some of the recordings where much of the music is missing. How will that spur people to listen further. But what to call it???
How about: Toscanini: the remastered, and Toscanini: the Legacy.
If I had the funds, I would snatch up the rights of some great recordings from defunct indie labels and release them for $4.99 a pop. If I was a major, I'd be peddling them for $3.99-4.99 in mini cardboard "record jackets". Classical buyers are willing to keep it afloat. The industry just needs to apply a little effort and innovation. I'm pretty sure many recordings that Jascha Heifetz, Horowitz, Gould and the like would fly off "the shelves" at that price.
To be honest, I really could care less about throwing $15-20 at another new performance of the Beethoven violin concerto or Mozart Symphony.
Sadly, I am now seeing the film industry turning hard media into a boutique medium. What they want to charge for a Vincent Price film on Bluray that has sold, literally, thousands upon thousands of copies on DVD is just stupidity. It actually harms interest. When I saw them trying to peddle mediocre films on Bluray for $20 or more that one could find in the DVD bins at Wal-Mart for $5 or less, I realized the consumer was getting dumber and these distributors were getting greedier. Thankfully, some are starting to realize how dumb they have been.
I must admit I've become addicted to cheap box sets. It would be hard to go back to paying $30 a cd. I will pay extra for a high resolution download though. That's a way record companies can still value add to their product new and old. Perhaps that's the future.
Why will you buy the next Toscanini edition, Dave? You're just encouraging them. Concentrate on stuff that hasn't been released even ONCE, or stuff that a few people who would like if they knew about it would buy it. Like Nielsen, for example or Malcolm Arnold or all those 20th century Amercan symphonists like David Diamond or Walter Piston or Howard Hanson? (NOT William Schuman, though, thanks!). 🙂 There is still good, honest work to be done by people like you! TEN-HUT!!
I will buy it because I have a professional obligation to keep abreast of such things. And it's fun.
It's probably already been brought up in the fulsome comments here, but I remember the first Toscanini CDs being in the mid-'80s pressed in Japan but sold in the US with these ugly grey covers and they sounded like crap. The ones you show with the black and white and gold embossed logo I always considered to be the second phase in the reissuing of his stuff - albeit more complete.
and of course - are we, as record collectors and listeners blameless? having been around with people recommending recordings- nobody in their right mind would recommend you buy the $999 Karajan box - they'd be telling you things like how good the Sony Essential Classics line which gave you recordings from people like Ormandy and Szell for dirt cheap was. You'd always hear about how good Naxos was- the no-frills packaging even made us feel cool, because we were making a statement that all that mattered was the music on the disc. We always want the good stuff for cheap because we care about the music, and (supposedly) not the packaging!
Incidentally, I poke around LP shops for old classical because it's fun to collect and listen to - do you remember the RCA Soira boxes? Beautiful packaging, looking more like a first edition of a literary masterpiece than an album. The booklet touted that it was printed with some luxury paper stock from a company in Italy somewhere, and the LPs were hefty, thick pieces of vinyl. Just beautiful- though I wonder what they cost in today's money.
Actually, while the Naxos packaging might not be the most imaginative, the label actually treats the music better than most majors. You always get comprehensive notes, intelligently written. Texts and translations of vocal works are available on line, or in the booklet. The product has that most essential of qualities: honesty. And as I said in the talk, the difference between $5 and $15 or even $20 may be significant to you in terms of the quality of stuff you can buy, but as a general determinant of the "class" of product into which recorded music falls, it is irrelevant. It's all cheap entertainment.
@@DavesClassicalGuide off topic but half the reason I buy old opera LPs are the booklets. I simply can't do electronic librettos- I don't want to look at a smartphone when listening to music, and CD booklets are just too small.
I bought an old RCA set with live recordings of Strauss (Astrid Varnay in Elektra caught my attention) and they even included the actual Met libretto- beautiful modernist design with that old Met logo and the title in Helvetica, straight out of the most hip late 60s modernist style guide imaginable.
The sound quality of a CD is a lot better than that of vinyls, 96dB of dynamic range, 22kHz worth of audio, better stereo image, compare that with the vinyl with a mere 60 to 70dB of dynamic range, only about 12kHz of audio and less of a stereo image - same goes for cassette tape. An MP3 at the normal bitrate of 128kbps can outstrip that.
@@johnb6723 oh yes, not to mention that classical is uniquely sensitive to surface noise, as it has far more musically important quiet sections than most popular music.
Still, LPs are fun to collect- and cheap, unlike popular LP prices these days!
I think that the internet had something to do with it, rather then just their attitude towards marketing.
Our local charity shop has posted a huge sign in its window NO MORE CDs PLEASE.
Perhaps the music labels should create a music appreciation curriculum that can be provided to school districts for free that incorporate their recorded legacies. That way, if students are interested, they can be introduced to classical music and become potential buyers in their own right.
Naxos has done that.
Music, generally has become almost literally worthless-an enormous amount of it available for a relatively low monthly cost. I think the only major label which doesn't stream is Hyperion, and guess what label I see the classical kids pirating the most? The only way people will pay over $10 for an album anymore is if it's sold as a luxury product (vinyl), or if they're supporting the artist specifically (Bandcamp)
If Music HQ is no longer going to do it, that means they're DOING SOMETHING ELSE, something not publicly known yet. Either that, or they're preparing to go bankrupt...
I think it is because those who purchased the furniture would not spend a fortune to buy another furniture with the same stuff. If the record company wants to squeeze out more earnings from the same recordings, they need to come up with a cheaper product to attract different types of buyers. The Japanese found another way to earn money by selling the same stuff on sacd, xrcd, lpcd, shmcd, dvd-audio, bluray-audio, 24k gold disc, etc. I think it all comes down making money and staying alive.
You're right. Instead of a shelf they should reissue it as a sofa.
I can listen on a streaming site and RUclips Premium to almost every one of the recordings you cite. I couldn't do that if I had to pay fifteen bucks an hour for plastic. Cheaper classical music is more accessible classical music. Sure, very cheap things can be misused, but some people thought radio and recordings diminished music. Do libraries and online books reduce the value of literature? A library card will get you stacks of online music. Then really, what have platters in boxes, cardboard sleeves and glass-fronted shelves to do with the vibrations that are the sound of music? Suppose it came in bottles. Would an expensive Venetian blown-glass bottle better represent Toscanini's Beethoven than a pop bottle? Now that the arbitrary limitations of manufacture, distribution and retail have vanished the vast body of recordings is always present. Classical music is not cheap because owner/producers debased it, but because it can’t be sold any other way. You did say that. After sixty years pretending it wasn’t happening we have to accept that the “classical" repertoire began around 1750 and stalled at 1960. Gubaidulina is great, but for the public she’s no Grieg. Between 1992 and 2004 I owned The Magic Flute, one of Vancouver B.C.’s two best-stocked classical CD stores. It went out of business in 2006, a victim of the fall in the cost (not aesthetic value obviously) of the “product” (ugh), high rents and high property taxes. People had replaced their record collections, the rarefied repertoire didn’t sell (say, one Gubaidulina to five hundred Grieg), the community of interest shrank and online access was clearly on its way. As to two square feet of furniture holding zeros and ones, space is super-expensive in many places. Notes are a loss, but a huge amount of information is online, and IDAGIO is beginning to include the specific notes. But hey, something is up, online sites and magazines are stuffed with reviews of new CD’s. Online sales make a market out of people spread very far apart. The luxury presentations of such as Palazzetto Bru-Zane are marvellous, and there is no reason why there should not exist a market for such things. But they are not the way most people are going to access music. I don’t feel sad about any of this. I can spend my declining years listening to everything stacked on those enormous shelves behind you.